Elevating team projects through agile methodology
Client
The Wellington School
Industry
Education
Category
Agile, Project management, Leadership
Challenge & Considerations
-
My co-teacher and I designed curriculum for the course “Advertising the Environment.” This course would ask students to produce a marketing campaign on behalf of the environment. We decided to adapt Agile/Scrum methodologies to the classroom.
-
Many group projects in the past tended to become unbalanced, with one or two students doing all the work and the entire group earning the same grade.
-
Implementing Scrum would take convincing other teachers/administrators that the system would lead to stronger student work.
-
We could find no curriculum that already used Scrum, so my co-teacher and I would need to figure out the application from scratch.
Process
-
I began by getting Scrum Master certification. This 16-hour course covered all aspects of the framework in a business setting.
-
I then served as the school’s unofficial Scrum Master, introducing both students and teachers to the framework through large group presentations.
Results
-
We saw group project performance increase dramatically. Being able to track individual student contributions offered incentives to each student.
-
At the end of the course, we launched “Trash Week,” a full school information campaign on the production and reduction of waste.
-
Other teachers have adopted the Scrum framework in their classes for group projects.
