I’ve always thought of myself as a non-conformist, even though I have a strong inkling that others view me very much as a conformist. Perhaps this is why I feel so at home in Switzerland – I’m a non-conformist committed to following the rules. I’m willing to put up with a fair number of constraints if the train comes on time, the mountain roads are meticulously maintained, and things just plain work.

So I’ve read with interest over the years the stories of those who have succeeded because they bucked the trend. I like reading about people who quit school to build famous businesses, who were fiercely independent and are now successful because of it. Of course, I enjoy reading about them after coming home from my comfortable middle class job with a dental plan and a pension.

I realized one day that I didn’t have to just admire the folks I knew that were hacking their own education. (Besart, you know I’m thinking about you here, the Meister of moving from one opportunity to another by working your network.) I don’t need to admire from afar and lament that I don’t have the same spirit. I actually have hacked some of my education, back in the day. I just hadn’t thought of it like that.

After a short stint as a short order cook following graduation (Remember the Embers?), I moved to Germany, enrolled in the university in order to get a work permit, and did enough odd jobs to support two hobbies: writing poetry and traveling. The experience created a second rate but well traveled poet who fell in love with a third hobby, languages.

I sort of thought I was just being a slacker for those four years between undergraduate and graduate school, but I think I can reasonably reframe that time as hacking my own education. I was, after all, a student at the university (who didn’t attend the classes in my declared major, but I did join the theater troupe, learn some Swedish, read for hours in the library, and write for many more in the computer lab). I learned German through those activities and odd jobs, and with my collection of Donald Duck comic books from every country I visited, I learned to marvel at how languages work.

The hacker mentality that I learned during those years has stayed with me. It has been second nature to me for a long time to supplement any on the job training with additional opportunities, whether related to the job or not. I almost always jump at the chance to join a professional development opportunity, even when the connection to my responsibilities is a bit tenuous. I’ve regularly taken extra computer classes, went with the yearbook crew on a weekend retreat, attended conference sessions on a whim, signed up for MOOCS ranging from chicken care (University of Edinburgh) to studying complexity (Santa Fe Institute). A professor of mine once said “You read the strangest things,” which I took as a compliment. I think I’ve also been rather adept at constantly redefining my role in my current position so that work stays both relevant and interesting.

Those hacker years, even though I was worried at the time that they were slacker years, contributed greatly to my personal drive for lifelong learning. I’m not only curious, something I may have been lucky to have been born with and to grow up with in my family, I’m also willing to find a way to learn more, in my free time or combined with my job, and to make connections between seemingly unrelated pursuits.

Now I find myself quite committed to helping students learn to self-regulate, to make their education their own, to learn when it is worthwhile to follow a pursuit that others may not be so readily supporting. In short, I’m all about helping students learn to hack their education more and follow the prescribed route less. But in a measured, polite, Swiss way.

Sometimes a little avocation creeps into your life that you might not notice until someone else points it out for you. Maybe there’s something that you have to get done so you take care of it, and that leads to another something or other that needs getting done, and pretty soon you know a little bit about it and find you enjoy it. You might call it an interest, something short of a hobby.

I’ve developed an interest in what learning spaces look like. Not until a colleague pointed this out, though, did I step back and take some time to think about it. Had I become, in a small way, an interior decorator for the school? 

This past year I began moving a new program into a two-floor, six room building that we used to call the Math Chalet, because it has a Swiss Chalet look about it and math classes were taught here. Over the past year we turned it into the Edge Chalet to host some of our alternative programs.

I didn’t want the classrooms to look like classrooms, so room by room I removed the desks and chairs with furniture you might expect to find in your house. In fact, to keep costs down, I used a number of pieces of furniture that I got from houses, others and even my own. I aimed for a look that was less school, more house. What I didn’t know about interior design I made up for by simply eliminating the uniformity of the typical school classroom.

I started with one room, purchasing some furniture in pairs: small wooden kitchen tables with matching chairs, two blue armchairs, two tables with drawers. I set the room up symmetrically, with a view across the balcony at Le Chamossaire, a Swiss Alp which gives the room a breathtaking view.

A carpet and a bookstand split the two halves of the room. Using pictures of my own family and other household miscellania I made the room feel homey. I left the whiteboards in the room, holdovers from the math department. Behind the door I tucked a small fridge and a coffee maker. 

The room is now my office, and the office of visiting scholars, when they are on campus. It can also be a breakout room for the other learning spaces (I can’t call them classrooms, they just aren’t that) in the building. We meet here with student advisory groups, too. The room holds up to ten people comfortably.

Gradually the other rooms in our new Edge Chalet lost their classroom look to more welcoming hangout spaces. A building in town slated to be torn down gave its last furniture away one weekend. A colleague and I collected a worn wooden cupboard, full of dust and character, as well as a long red farm table and some benches. We matched these pieces with some more modern furniture, hung pictures on the wall to help the farmhouse look, and we were done. Another room became a convenient spot for me to store my old roll top desk, which didn’t fit in my new apartment anyway, and a large chest of drawers. That room had a piano, which gives the room lots of character. I hung pictures from two former art teachers and added maps to the wall (and in the cubbies of the desk) to give the room a travel theme. As an international school teacher, I had plenty of other knick knacks for decoration, including gifts from visitors.

You can tell I enjoy doing this. And when I look back, I’ve been enjoying it for a while. I just hadn’t noticed. A few years ago I took a skinny, underused classroom in a different building and turned it into what is now called the Research Lounge. I love that name. It’s also a living room and café sort-of-space with rugs and plants. It is a place for teachers and students to be that is calm, respectful, and less schooly. 

And before the research lounge, a colleague and I took two large rooms in yet another building and created a large makerspace. I remember getting inspired during a conference at the International School of Brussels. They had recently remodeled with lots of thinking space, I think they called it. So we brought in high and low tables, stools and couches, rolling whiteboards which doubled as space dividers, large screens, a sound system, and plenty of storage. We also had plants and decent wall decorations.

Why is the appearance of a learning space so important?

Most simply, because it is a place we spend time in. Better that it be aesthetic and comfortable than boring and uncomfortable. Maybe a test would be this: if you were designing an office for yourself – a place where you were going to spend a lot of time – would you design a standard classroom? Or something more inviting?

School reformers talk plenty about moving away from a factory model. Because school reform is notoriously sluggish, I imagine that reformers would like every possible advantage to help shift the way teaching and learning plays out. Here’s where I think the learning space really matters. Consider school environments that you are familiar with. Are most of the spaces filled with tables/desks and chairs? Is there an obvious power center of the room, probably in the front, perhaps filled with the teacher’s items and a space to address the whole class? Does the orientation of the room assume a specific teaching style? Does a whiteboard figure predominantly?

All of those things matter. They affect how we think about teaching and learning. And they do it perniciously. We don’t really notice how the space is affecting us because it’s just there. But the space matters.

Several years ago there was some excitement at our school because we took whiteboards to the next level, straight past Smartboards to short-throw projectors aimed at specially prepared walls which allow manipulation of the computer image through touch, as well as drawing on the walls with markers and hanging materials with magnets. Some teachers use them, some don’t, results are a little mixed, but of this I am certain: the set up reinforces, for all but the most careful teacher, a classroom of stand and deliver. The set up also makes the classrooms quite schoolish looking, since the blank white wall becomes the focus of the room and a natural station for the teacher, the teacher’s desk, the place for lecturing … you see what I mean.

Now that I think about it, classroom design started for me with my first administrative job, leading German immersion language teachers at Concordia Language Villages in the early 1990s. Folks were a little surprised when I removed the tables from the classrooms one summer. You can’t come to summer camp to learn through language immersion and then sit at a table with books and pens! Or at least that’s what my young idealistic self thought. (There may actually be some merit to the idea: I’ve noticed a few posts from teachers using TPRS – Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling – that eschew classroom tables, too). 

At any rate, if, when you were picturing classrooms in your mind, you found it hard to think of examples that don’t look like traditional school, you might ask yourself how far from the factory model teaching and learning can really hope to be. And if you have even a little interest in interior design, the next time you set up a classroom, make it just a little less school and a little more home, a unique spot, built perhaps for just a bit more creativity and collaboration over uniformity and competition. 

Recently I went back to the Schools of the Future report by the World Economic Forum (WEF). It’s dated January 2020. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at their recommendations and the exemplary programs they chose to highlight, you probably should take a minute to do that now. I won’t be offended.

If you want a preview, here are my takeaways.

The report recommends shifting the learning experiences we educators provide our students. They encourage teaching and learning to look like this:

• Personalized and self-paced learning;
• Problem-based and collaborative learning; and
• Lifelong and student-driven learning. 

To better understand the need for a shift, we could ask ourselves what we are shifting away from. So let’s imagine the opposite. I’m going to overstate the contrast here a bit, but I think my list is a good discussion starter. In short, the WEF is recommending we do less of this:

• Depersonalized learning that maintains the myth of students learning in sync;
• Focus on recall and the insistence of “eyes on your own paper” / “do your own work;” and
• Content from a worn out canon determined by institutional inertia, which limits the creativity of schools and teachers.

Does this second list describe too much of the way we go about education? Does it describe what you see and hear, what you perhaps feel pulled into more often than you would like? 

Do systems like off-the-shelf and/or standardized curricula, bell schedules, assessment regimes, curriculum mapping, over-reliance on rubrics and other accepted teaching practices pull us toward the second list, the list of WEF opposites? 

And what are we to do about it?

The authors of the report note that “Much work is being done by private sector chief human resource officers on customizing work experiences to enable lifelong learning and integrating alternative work models to improve flexibility” (Schools of the Future, 2020 p. 11). They refer to a table in an earlier WEF publication (Shaping People Strategie in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2019) about the “changing nature of how learning is approached in an organization” (p. 18). They report again on a shift:

From Know-it-all mindset … to Learn-it-all mindset

From Planned learning programs … to Lifelong learning culture

FromPeriodic learning … to Continuous learning

From Company-directed learning … to Self-driven learning

From Homogenous learning … to Personalized learning

Are we doing our part by preparing students for an adult life characterized by the right hand column above? I’m frankly worried that it is too easy to make parallels between much of our current teaching and learning with the column on the left. For starters:

We as teachers may not feel comfortable in an environment where we are not the expert, limiting the chances we provide to explore with students, to allow them to teach us, to be learners side by side. Our assessments reinforce this know-it-all mindset because they are overwhelmingly about being right or wrong, black or white, true or false. (See Elon Musk’s entrance exam to his school, Ad Astra, for a refreshing contrast.)

Further, our curriculum and instruction is full of planned learning, in quite specific and predictable periods (grade 10 biology, grade 11 chemistry, grade 12 physics – sound familiar?), overwhelmingly decided by the “company” and certainly favoring a particular style of learning at a predetermined pace. 

Companies are shifting. I believe schools are trying to shift, too. In schools, however, there is less fear of shareholders, competition, and going bust. There is perhaps too much room to be cautious, changing perhaps so slowly that it’s hard to notice much change at all.

Self-paced, student-driven, collaborative learning that creates lifelong learners is not unattainable if we let go of the assumptions and practices that constrain us most. Be courageous to identify those assumptions and practices and to openly question them. If you are a teacher, create the conditions the WEF is recommending, when and where you can. If you are an administrator, avoid the temptation to sound smart by reciting yesterday’s “knowns.” They are safe, yes. But they are hamstringing us, and worse, our students. When you can, be bold. Be just a bit more outspoken about how teaching and learning can fulfill the promise of self-regulated learners. 

Or, I suppose, let companies re-educate adults who didn’t get the right hand column from us when they were students.

World Economic Forum. (2020). Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Geneva, Switzerland.

World Economic Forum. (2019). WHR4.0: Shaping People Strategies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Geneva, Switzerland.

Paul is working with ScrumAlliance on the first agile certification specifically for educators: the Agile Certified Educator. 

For the better part of a year I’ve been working with a small group on a new approach to teaching and learning. At least, we believe it is new. But sometimes we question ourselves.

Here’s the issue.

As we move away from the norm – away from our regular experience with education – we start introducing more and more new terminology to describe our vision. It doesn’t take long before what we’ve written isn’t terribly clear, because of the new terminology. We then rewrite using terminology more familiar to us as educators. Then the text is clearer, but … we find that it is clearer because readers relate with the text by understanding it as their regular experience with education. And that’s not the goal.

This in turns introduces a new level of concern for us. Originally we were worried that using language common to education would impede readers understanding the unique quality of what we are proposing. So we introduced new terms, which make what we are saying hard to understand, leading us back to common terminology, which waters down our vision. As we continued working, we began sliding back and forth along this continuum.

Now we have to ask ourselves if our vision may simply not be all that grandiose a departure from our regular experience of education because of our ability to move back and forth on a continuum. If on one end of our semantic continuum we are able to describe in words familiar to educators what is already familiar in practice, is the other end of the continuum, expressed in unfamiliar terms, actually different in practice? Are we really breaking new ground or are we just renaming things? (We believe we are going beyond renaming.)

I imagine this is a common problem with new ideas. Namely, there isn’t quite the right words to describe them. New terms sound contrived and are hard to understand. Current terms reinforce current understandings, which isn’t really the point. Arriving at any understanding tends to mean arriving at current understanding. Again, not the point.

Maybe this is what folks mean when they say they can’t describe something, but they’ll know it when they see it. And maybe that provides a bit of the answer to the problem. We need more people actually seeing the different teaching and learning we are writing about. We may need examples of what this new manner of teaching and learning is before we try so hard to describe it. Short of actually experiencing it, perhaps we move forward by describing real examples more and the theory less. Then with time the terminology may come.

Interested in pulling agility into education? Contact Paul at [email protected]

with Bill Tihen, Software Developer at Garaio, Bern, and former teacher and IT director at LAS 

See Part 1 with this same title, in which Bill and I point out the irony that our busy academic schedules, created and driven by our push to cover lots of material efficiently, squeeze out exploration and making mistakes. If our argument is correct – that not having space for exploration may contribute to lower quality learning – well, we have a problem. Maybe we’ve been shooting ourselves in the foot for so long that we don’t even notice the pain we’re causing.

Practice with trial and error, mistakes, and deadends

To address the lack of exposure to setbacks and mistakes that characterize many traditional classrooms, I, Bill, adopted a routine that is both manageable (i.e. not so new to students that it throws them for a serious loop) and likely to create a culture that can start changing their school-created aversion to mistakes.

For example, in a STEAM class, I like to check-in with student groups in the first five to ten minutes of class by asking them about their next steps. I don’t want to tell them what to do next, but I do want to know what they are planning to do next so I can plan whereI might be needed most during class.

Similarly, I like students to finish their self-guided work five to ten minutes before the end of class so they have time to tell me what they discovered and what they are planning to do next class period. I do this by talking with each student work group. We focus on talking about mistakes as learning opportunities, because they are part of the discovery. Mistakes are expected. We learn from them. That message has to get across.

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Bill Gates [source]

Students need to stop and reflect regularly in order to adjust their plans. Although this seems obvious, it is crazy rare among students. They have very little practice making their own plans, let alone refining their plans as they work. Like we’ve argued above, students have internalized an expectation that the teacher should provide all the guidance. We shouldn’t wonder too long why students focus on being right and being efficient instead of learning and improving. The way we do school has taught them over and over that right and efficient equals success.

Bill tries to counter this “follower” mindset by encouraging students to identify (and act) on these things: 

• their most important success and their most important problem;
• the conditions that are supporting their progress;
• the conditions that are creating a current problem or a likely future problem; and
• the things that will help them the most, e.g. what is their plan to make current good work better and to deal with challenges.

I mentioned that as students leave class they share with me their action plan for the next class. In this manner they can arrive at the next class with their plan in mind so they can start without direction from me. 

They tell me what they will do during the next class. This might be about their group dynamics, but it should also touch on the next small step of their work. Since it doesn’t come naturally to students who are used to waiting for the teacher to direct their work, students need practice. 

I set up their practice with three guidelines for an action plan: 

• it should be an experiment. Students should be able to say what they will do, and for how long – preferably in a short cycle;
• it should be a small bet (meaning it is no a big deal if it doesn’t work); and
• It should pass the “live” test and fail the “dead” test.

This last requirement needs a little more explanation. 

The live person test means that whatever their action plan is, it must be something that a live – a real – person can actually do, without superhero powers. It must be something reasonable to do.

At the same time, their plan must fail the dead person test, meaning it must be something that a dead person cannot do! For example, a group of middle schoolers might say that their action plan is to fight less. But that isn’t valid, because it fails the dead person test. While it’s a good idea, dead people don’t fight either, so they need to reframe their action plan into what they will actually do when they disagree.

Do this with a regular rhythm, with a visual checklist that both teachers and students readily see, and the students will get quite good at learning the basics of self-regulation.

with Bill Tihen, Software Developer at Garaio, Bern, and former teacher and IT director at LAS 

We want – or we should want – to give our students safe experiences to deal with change, whether it is changing their approach, changing the way they perceive things, or changing themselves. Because if there is one thing we can predict they are going to have to be good at, it’s dealing with change. 

“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.” – John Wooden [source]

If you aren’t sure that you agree, think about the last time you were working with colleagues who have difficulty changing their approach, their perception, or themselves. When we think of  recent examples in our own work lives, our  shoulders stiffen and feelings of stress well up inside. You probably have a similar reaction. But then ask yourself: how often did our schooling focus on getting comfortable with change?

The message to students we have historically sent – and continue to send – is to “get it right the first time,” not because we don’t believe in teaching about change, but because the curriculum is a list of things to learn. It’s a checklist of content for a particular subject (multiplied by 6 or 7 to cover the traditional subject areas). This checklist approach to content crowds out a focus on skills, e.g. learning to deal with change, to grow from change, and to accept that change is constant. 

Buy in through choice

Students will get practice dealing with change if we build the need for change into our instruction. Instead of trying to be efficient, which tends to make us avoid student exploration, we might be well served to ease up a bit and give them time for discovery.

But they won’t just start doing this without our help. 

First, with our focus on speed, coverage, quantity, right answers, assessment, and rankings, we’ve trained students not to explore. Mistakes = bad, right answer = good. In perhaps one of the biggest educational ironies imaginable, what we might include in best practice might actually reduce student thinking. Imagine if that’s really the case.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” –Thomas Edison [source]

Second, we will have to work on school culture, not just content goals, to build a safe environment in which to explore. Exploration means making mistakes, which means freedom to make those mistakes, which comes with safety and trust.

And third, we’ll have to include in that culture a desire to persevere, to work through setbacks. Mistakes need to be motivating, not demotivating.

To do this, students must be engaged, which is often easiest if students have a real and significant choice in setting their own goals. We have unfortunately made choice difficult, what with our long list of adult-determined goals. Where is there room for students to learn to set their own goals, relevant to their own drive?

We clearly have work to do. 

Some thoughts on what that might look like in the next blog …

Like so many parents across the world, I’ve been watching, and occasionally helping, my 9-year old navigate online learning. I have it pretty easy, with all of the resources one needs, a fourth grade curriculum that isn’t too demanding, a spouse that is doing a greater share of the work than me, and a wonderful, progressive teacher. I’m also observing a child who is confident, self-motivated, eager to learn, and willing to go with the flow. 

So I’ve got it really easy.

I also had the unique chance to watch her move from face to face school, to an online version of that school, and into a two-week spring break. What an opportunity amidst all the uncertainty and suffering. A bit of a silver lining.

What I’ve noticed is that there is no clear difference in Chloé’s learning behaviors when school is in session and when it’s not. With online school, she is busy for perhaps an hour per day, on average. We print some materials, lend our phones for her to make videos, sometimes sit next to her. And when spring break came and there were no longer any school assignments, not too much really changed. 

One of those days during spring break went like this.

Chloé woke up late. She joined me in the living room and read Harry Potter for a good stretch of time. Then I made breakfast.

Because I was working from home, after breakfast she was able to join me at the table. She had recently started a touch typing tutorial (typingclub.com). Together we typed, side by side. In hindsight I was modeling by doing email and the usual sort of writing tasks one does. I didn’t give any instruction, but every now and then she told me of a success with a new letter or a new fastest speed. This went on well over an hour.

We took a break to play our newest sport: hacky sack. No soccer clubs will be calling, there are no YouTube videos in our future. But we laugh and celebrate small successes. 

She tinkers afterwards with a combination of hobbies, playing the piano and using a composition tool I’ve been experimenting with (noteflight.com). She doesn’t have regular piano lessons, but now and again my sister, a professional music teacher, listens to her play over Skype. Because I was writing some piano pieces, Chloé wrote one, too. A question about different keys had become a full on music theory lesson a few nights before. Now she wanted to use Noteflight to write down her original song. I gave her my computer. Chloé began writing and moving back and forth from the table to the piano. Together we learned more about how Noteflight works. (It’s pretty slick.) 

That evening she helped make dinner and set the table. We ate as a family (all too rare when life was “normal,” a sobering thought), and then we played a board game, as a family. The offline activities are a welcome balance to the various online options. Chloé has learned Settlers of Catan, adopting a preference for the ore and development card strategy, if you are familiar with the game. We cannot cut her any slack, she wins now a fair amount of time.

To fall asleep we read together, she more of Harry Potter, me something else. She filled me in on the latest plot twists. She shared a passage that she found funny. 

That day was not atypical. It was like all of them during that two-week break, though her focus moved between different activities. (Currently she’s been drawing with Art for Kids Hub, on YouTube). I didn’t homeschool. I didn’t monitor learning. There were no assessments, at least not in the way we think of school assessments. There wasn’t vertical or horizontal alignment of curriculum, classroom hours, balanced subjects, test preparation, none of that. There wasn’t teaching, at least how we commonly think of it with school. 

But there was learning. Not learning I could predict, at least not exactly. She reads. I figure she’ll read. When she wants to. She’s curious about the piano. Whether she plays or not is up to her. Learning about music composition – well that’s neat. We’ll share that interest as I prepare for a class I agreed to teach next school year. Touch typing? Great skill, why not!

And hacky sack? Not really part of the school curriculum. One could make it so by talking about physical coordination and number of required kicks and how to use the knee and top of the foot and then an assessment… no, let’s not go there.

This was Chloé’s Unschool. Yes, I recognize again all the affordances in her favor. But still … Weaned from several hours of school a day to just one hour, and then to none during spring break, did not stop learning. It opened learning up. What it stopped was school. Learning became more individual, more self-regulated, more pertinent, more enjoyable, more relaxed, more exploratory. 

Now just as I finish writing this, Chloé has completed a project for online school, which started again this week. She has prepared the traditional Swiss Birchermuesli, by herself. Compliments to her teacher for the assignment – and for Chloé for doing this activity just like all the others during her “break” – independently, joyfully.

There are lessons here for us that we don’t want to forget post-pandemic. I’m going to think about that – after I try the Birchermuesli. 

In the previous post I mentioned that my daughter Emma’s Kanban board was demonstrating three basic Kanban principles. These are making work visual, limiting the amount of work you are doing at one time, and managing workflow.

Making work visual

I’m chuckling as I write this because it seems like putting all the work you intend to do in one spot might bring on a whole lot of stress! Perhaps if all our tasks were just an unordered collection (or even a long To Do list?), stress might well be the outcome.

But the Kanban board neatly shows which work is at what stage. Much work is there, but only some is getting worked on. Other work might be waiting for someone else, so it’s not something you need to worry about now. And of course, some work is done, a nice reminder that tasks waiting to be started will indeed be Done one day. 

Seeing all the work at once also removes the sense that you are forgetting something – that something is going to sneak up on you and upset the apple cart. It’s all there, there’s an order to things, there’s an invitation to get started on …

Limiting work in progress

… one thing. You can see the whole work load, but you are probably most effective when you work on one thing at a time, in the moment, with focus. The simple structure of the Kanban board invites you to pull a task into the Doing column only after you have finished the previous task. Now the board is giving you the right to quit thinking about the previous task and to start thinking about the new task. You’ve chosen it, now commit to just that task until it can be moved to a new status. 

In practice, limiting yourself to one task needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But the general principle is sound: limit the number of tasks that feel active, pressing, and required right now. It’ll make you feel much better and you may see both your process and product jump a bit in quality.

In sum, The Kanban board let’s you see your workload, gives you permission to work on one thing at a time, and the process it’s supporting …

Managing workflow

… allows you to manage your workflow. You know what tasks are out there waiting for your attention, which you are working on now, and which are finished. You also have a tool for quick prioritization (and re-prioritization) of your tasks, because you only have one To Do item per sticky note. Reordering them is a snap. 

Communicating your workflow to others is also easy. My friend and mentor Bill Tihen liked to tell a story of his boss rushing into the office with a new project that was “top priority.” Bill walked him to the Kanban board and said, “OK. Which of these other tasks in the TO DO or DOING column should I take off the board?” “No, no,” the boss exclaimed, “those are all top priority, too.” “But that doesn’t work,” Bill answered, pointing at the board. “There’s a limit to what we can work on at one time. You’ll have to choose the top top-priority.”

In teacher workshops when I ask if they’ve ever experienced anything similar, everyone nods. I’m sure anyone, in any job, has had this feeling. Having a simple tool to manage this feeling (and the reality of how you go about getting things done) seems pretty worthwhile.

Here’s an example from my younger daughter, Chloé. She has seen examples of Kanban in my office and, most recently, in her sister’s room. So she went and made one for herself. I wrote out her first tasks (on the pink speech bubble stickies) and she did the rest. The three colors at the bottom, she explained, are the type of stickies she is going to use for each of those three areas of her life: school, gym(nastics), and other, once she’s used up the pink ones I made. Color coding is, in fact, a common Kanban process. Chloé has also included a column here that I find very stress-relieving, the column called Stuck. I use it for tasks that I have completed up to the point where someone else now needs to act before I can continue. Those tasks are done, but only temporarily. It’s easy to occasionally scan the stickies in the Stuck column and to send reminders to colleagues that I’m waiting on them. Then when they’ve completed what they needed to do, the task is unstuck and I can move it back to TO DO, waiting for when I have time, directly to DOING, or if there is nothing more required of me, right to DONE. Simple.

Now, I just need to go talk to Chloé about including both” Harry Potter” and “Bike Ride” in the TO DO column at the same time …

For several years now we’ve been talking about agility at Leysin American School. There is just something so compelling about managing your work, either alone or with a team, in an easy, visible way. A simple Kanban board (or scrum board) is a great place to start.

The simplest version has columns for tasks you want to do, tasks you are working on, and tasks that are completed. You can think of this as a “To Do” list with some easily added features. 

First, “Doing” is not found on a simple list, which is usually a column of items that are not crossed off (To Do) or crossed off (Done). The Doing column matters because it helps you focus. In general, you pull only one task from the To Do column into Doing at a time. It helps you avoid trying to work on many tasks at once. Pick one and focus.

Second, a To Do list with one item per sticky note allows you to prioritize what task is next, and next after that, and so on. When you create your To Do list, you take your best guess at what is going to be a logical order to complete tasks. Then when you have space in your Doing column, you pull the next logical task over. Of course, you may change your mind about the logical order of tasks. No problem – just reorder the sticky notes. In this manner you’ll find that you always have a plan as well as an easy way to update the plan. 

Third, you don’t lose the satisfaction of crossing off completed items. You move them over to Done as a record of work accomplished. Unlike a simple checklist of tasks, some items in your Done column might be tasks you need to do again in the future. The sticky is ready … just move it back into the To Do column.

The Kanban board shown here was made by my daughter, Emma. She chose to include three different categories: school work, extended essay and CAS, and other. These three categories, represented in lanes on the board, are important to her because they help separate classes from other school work, and everything related with school from her personal life.

She made the board with tape and sticky notes, next to her desk. 

Kanban has only six basic rules. Emma is demonstrating the first three of them here. I’ll go into those three – and how this simple process addresses them, in the next blog.

Emma Magnuson is a junior at Leysin American School. She began using Kanban in eighth grade.

In 2015-2016 we planned a new middle school, with a minimalistic standards based grading system. In the same year, a math teacher piloted standards based grading in one of her grade 10 classes. The success of these two experiences led to whole school work on assessment in 2017-2018, culminating with an inservice by Ken O’Connor, based on our interest in his book A Repair Kit for Grading: Fifteen Fixes for Broken Grades. A coordinator was hired to lead the process in 2018-2019, which happened to coincide with a new PowerSchool administrator, and in Fall 2019 we launched standards based grading across the entire school.

Not without some issues, of course. 

But the issues haven’t given rise to any serious roadblocks, even if at times parents aren’t sure what grades mean and we teachers are left scratching our heads over how our inputs produced this or that Powerschool output. 

All in all I think we can say the transition has gone well. 

Faculty are indeed a bit weary of talking about assessment. It’s been multiple years now that this has been our school focus, so the creeping fatigue is understandable. Departments aren’t all on the same page and standards, though written, aren’t necessarily part of the school’s DNA. But we’ve successfully abandoned A-F grades. We’ve successfully separated course content from behavior – no longer is a student’s grade lowered because of a uniform violation or late work, things not directly associated with demonstrated student knowledge in a particular academic discipline. We report less by type of assessment and more by what is learned. And we are slowly aligning school privileges and identifying tutoring needs based on real need. Plus, the stage is set for a culture of students revising subpar work, or even good but not great work, to cyclically continue to improve. All good stuff.

But. You knew there was a but. And there is. 

But can we say that instruction has actually changed for the better? To what degree have we assimilated the changes, as teachers, in a way that supersedes reporting, interfacing with PowerSchool, toeing the new line, and so on. The big question:

Are students likely to learn more due to our new assessment system? This was our hope.

So far it’s hard to say. And it’s hard to research. First, our scale has changed from A-F to 1-7, differently defined. We can’t compare one to the other to see if more learning is going on. And as our assessment leader pointed out, which group of teachers should we work with to see if we’re making a difference? The early adopters who have been operating quite close to our intended design? Or the early adopters who have been more liberal in their adoption? Or the late adopters who may be on the right track, but don’t have much experience yet? Or the late not-quite adopters who need more time to get on board? 

And there’s one other interesting question, at least from the point of us research-practitioners. If we research instructional change and student outcomes based on any instructional changes due to the new assessment system too early, and find no change, are we damaging the potential for the new assessment practices to bring about change? Is it actually wisest not to ask ourselves yet if it’s “working?” 

But. When will be the right time?