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Learning to self-organise

Recently, I was working with a team that had quite a few team member changes. Old members of the team moved onto other projects and new recruits were brought in to work on the product I was working on.

One of the earliest conversations one of the new recruits had with me went along the lines of “Jit, I know we are a self-organising team, but I am struggling with this idea. I know we have planned for the next two weeks, but I really do not know what to do. I am not used to this, can you or someone else please tell me what item I should be specifically working on right now and then tell me what I should be working on after I have finished that?

I really appreciated their honesty and, after some discussion around the sprint backlog and the goal for the sprint and collaboration with the rest of the team, the were able to come up with a plan for what item needed to be worked on that day.

This situation may be fairly normal if a person has not been part of a self-organising team before (most of the time people are just not as honest as the team’s new recruit in admitting that they are finding self-organisation difficult).

It’s no surprise that some find this way of working unnatural. After all, it is not how work has been traditionally managed; in most traditional organisations, people are generally told what there job is, how they must do it and what they must work on.

However, I don’t think that we can just point the finger at the previous organisations that we have worked in as the only reason why we find self-organisation difficult. I think we can look further back, back to the time when we were in school. The pattern was similar then, someone at the front told you what you were going to learn and how you were going to learn about it. This pattern just carried on into our work life.

No wonder we find self-organising difficult, most people have known no other way of doing things.

That’s up until a few years back, 2011 to be specific. A chemistry and physics teacher in the Netherlands named Willy Wijnands initiated and founded eduScrum (eduscrum.nl). eduScrum brings elements of Scrum into the classroom, such as the concepts of sprints, sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives, as well as a board visualising the work in progress and daily stand ups. 

I was fortunate enough to speak to Willy recently. He said that the best thing about eduScrum is that “the students take ownership of their own learning“, much the same as a software team would take ownership of the delivery of potentially shippable software in a sprint. 

According to Willy, teachers take on a triple role. At first they do a small amount of teaching on a subject. Secondly they act as a Product Owner, where they specify what the objectives of the students’ learning should be for that particular subject. Thirdly, they act as a coach to the teams that have been formed in the class. The students, in their teams, then self-organise and decide on how they are going to get to those learning objectives.

A large focus for the teacher is coaching the students through their learning and there is a big emphasis on helping the students to grow as a team as well as individuals. 

How do the students feel about eduScrum. Well, the feedback Willy has received has been positive. He says that students “love the freedom of being able to learn the way that best suits them“, and they enjoy the process of “self-discovery” along with the “responsibility of delivering what they have committed to as a team“.

Towards the end of our call, Willy wanted to clarify that eduScrum is just “one approach to teaching and learning” and that the teachers are encouraged to use the approach that best fits the situation. Willy, in true inspect and adapt fashion, is constantly trying to evolve eduScrum and he has said that he is currently “working on a better version of eduScrum” based on previous experiences. 

I personally look forward to seeing what the new version brings, and I also look forward to future generations being more comfortable working in self-organising environments.

Image Credit: julipan (used under creative commons)

2 thoughts on “Learning to self-organise”

  1. Nice post Jit. Although it appears that UK schools – at least at primary level – are permitted to have some self-learning (e.g. research seems to play quite a large part), I think what Willy and his team are doing really allows children to build the best approach for THEM. Using it at a small scale, with staff who are competent to implement it is great, but it would need a revolution within the education system to roll this out nationwide!

  2. Thanks for sharing this great bit of news Jit.

    I do wonder, like Dave, when this revolution will come. The traditional approach to teaching is, as we all know, highly ineffective, and as you pointed out Jit, conditions learners into a state that makes them almost dependent on other telling them what to do. Education being what it is, I do hope a revolution will come. The evolutionary approach would take too long. It is only now that there is a Master of Arts degree available in ‘Project Management’!! While they lightly touch on the existence of ‘alternative’ approaches, the ball park of the curriculum is traditional project management. How long will it take for those ‘alternative’ approaches to become more prominent in the curriculum if it took the traditional approaches several decades to be sculpted into a degree?

    On a lighter note, the triple role of the teacher reminded me of my triple role when using Scrum for my running fitness training. My body is the team and my mind is balancing the Scrum Coach and Product Owner roles of self-preservation versus Performance Output.

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