During my first year as a teacher, I found myself teaching geometry in an international school in Vietnam. Although I started the year with a traditional, didactic approach to instruction, I soon saw an opportunity to move beyond these methods. The school's leaders had decided to build a new campus and had given architectural blueprints to the teachers for feedback. Despite having plenty of suggestions of my own, I decided to ask students what they thought. After all, this was going to be their school, and their perspectives were arguably more valuable than mine.
The class started with a productive debate in which students argued for or against certain building characteristics, including the grandiose entrance, marble floors, and indoor swimming pool. Overall, they felt that the designers had overlooked the student perspective by emphasizing aesthetics over functionality. For example, the design featured curved walls that decreased classroom visibility, and the classrooms that lacked adequate storage. For these reasons, they latched onto my hook and jumped at the opportunity to remedy these problems. In this way, I taught 3D figures, proportions, scale drawings, and similarity by allowing my students to design and build a 3D model of their dream school to present to school administrators.
The student-led process commenced with the class working on a new exterior design. After agreeing on the exterior outline and scale factor, the students broke into teams to tackle interior design by assigning one floor to each group. Watching this process unfold, I realized that collaboration was messier than I had anticipated, and I was left pondering questions like
- How should I grade students on their collaboration?
- How can I ensure that all students contribute to the process?
- Is there a way to make collaboration less messy?
Although I did not have answers to these questions at the time, I have since found that the Scrum process helps teachers manage group work so that students can see and reflect on their own contributions.
Getting on Board with Scrum
Scrum is a process developed as an organizational and accountability system for the complex world of IT (eduScrum, 2012), but it also applicable to K–12 education. Although there are numerous processes and systems involved in implementing Scrum faithfully, the core component is a Scrum board.
The Scrum board is any visible paper or board divided into three (or more) columns:
- Tasks to be completed.
- Tasks in progress.
- Completed tasks.
The individual teams of students then brainstorm everything they need to accomplish to end up with the desired final product. Students chunk these tasks into bite-sized pieces, and each piece is written on its own sticky note and placed in the first column. For example, a team working on the first floor may have tasks that include:
- determine the shape, size, and location of the main office
- construct the walls for the computer lab
- meet with the 2nd floor team to determine the location of stairwells and/or elevators
For the duration of the collaborative project, this column is a visual reminder of the work remaining and can help students keep track of their progress toward deadlines.
Figure
After the project has begun, students take ownership of tasks by choosing sticky notes, writing their names on them, and moving them to the in-progress column. Once the task is complete, they move the sticky note to the final column and are free to choose another task until the teacher or group decides that it is time to check in and reevaluate their progress. In this way, groups work toward a common goal while maintaining individual autonomy and leveraging the strengths of each member.
Evaluating Collaboration
In addition to providing a coherent structure and organization for group work, Scrum provides guidance for how group work is evaluated. With group work, teachers often choose between three assessment paradigms:
- Assessing students individually, which may undermine collaborative partnerships.
- Assessing the group as a whole, which may perpetuate unequal workloads and undermine student motivation (Kagan, 1995).
- Student self-assessment, which has been shown to be an unreliable measure (Zhang, Johnston, & Kilic, 2008).
Scrum allows teachers to combine all three paradigms to form a more holistic measure of both effort and achievement.
Scrum boards accomplish this by giving teachers a written record (in the form of sticky notes) of student work so that teachers can quickly determine which project components each student has been or is currently working on. The teacher can then use this data formatively to intervene and prompt student reflection and self-assessment throughout the process. For example, a teacher may ask students to gather the sticky notes with tasks they have accomplished and then reflect on their progress and contributions to the group using a collaboration rubric. This provides teachers with insights into student thinking and may encourage individual discussions aimed at refining the accuracy of their reflections. Paired with qualitative assessments of group dynamics, this data on student effort and output paints a comprehensive picture of student collaboration.
Managing and assessing group work is a daunting task even for seasoned teachers. Rubrics convey product expectations, but often the processes of group work can have teachers—and students—in the weeds. Scrum boards have helped IT planners keep projects on track and can help clarify roles and responsibilities for teachers and students engaged in collaboration. Despite years of being asked to collaborate, many students have never learned how. Scrum allows novice collaborators the opportunity to reflect on their contributions while providing expert collaborators with an organizational framework that leverages strengths to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
