Find Your Team's Beliefs Activity
Now that you know What Agile With Students is and Why you would use Agile with students from my last post, let's start exploring How to come up with a team's beliefs. In this post, I will offer up an example activity you could use with your students to help them find their team's beliefs.
First, in their teams...
Have students individually write down 4-5 belief statements about working in project teams. Examples may include:
I believe we should help each other
I believe we should give each other feedback that isn't mean
I believe we should listen to each other
I believe everyone should do their part
Give students time to have a dialogue on what they wrote and why they believe what they believe
As a team, sort belief statements for similar themes and come to a consensus on 3-4 team work belief statements.
Make sure everyone has been heard and is on board with the belief statements
Next, have teams turn their belief statements into action statements. Using our examples from above, it may look like this:
We will help each other when needed
We will give each other constructive, considerate feedback
We will listen to each other’s ideas
We will split the work up fairly
Now the team must make their actions visible by writing them down. I would recommend they keep both an electronic version AND on chart paper.
This is so the team can always see their actions and be reminded when working together.
When teams do their reflections at the end of the scrum, they can discuss if they kept true to their beliefs and actions.
This activity can be done at anytime and even without the other components of the scrum process, but it is highly recommended that this is the first thing students do when they first get in their teams. Everything they do during a project must reflect their beliefs and actions or you risk the team falling apart.
Another consideration is to give students examples of belief statements before having them individually brainstorm but it is very important you as the teacher don't decide for them. It is imperative that all students in a team buy-in to their team's beliefs, otherwise they are likely to ignore them and the project will suffer.
Try this with your students and let me know how it goes by commenting below. I'm excited to hear your progress! Next time, we will discuss how to help students with their project ideas when starting the scrum process.