Agile Education in Practice - A Conversation with Paul Magnuson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Schools are one of the biggest push systems that you can imagine. Here's the curriculum, we're pushing that on you. Here's the timetable, that gets pushed on you. Here's what you should be interested in. You know, what we're trying to say with agility is that we really need to focus on pull. But it feels like we could be doing so much more. Like, why settle for what we have right now if we really could be doing a lot more?

Welcome back. Hello everybody. Thanks for tuning in again to the Future Learning Design Podcast. As one of my personal mentors and inspirations, it's a huge pleasure to be able to speak to Paul Magnussen today. Paul Magnussen is the Director of Educational Research at Lausanne American School in Switzerland. He attributes his progressive views on education to over 20 years of experience working in summer camps. He's done with command and control models that tend to favor conformity and compliance over self-regulation, whether that's for teachers or for students. Paul established the Lausanne American School Educational Research Center, which is a hub for visiting scholars, applied educational research, and agile explorations. With his ex-colleague and friend Bill Thien, Paul has been working on pulling agile into education for many years. You can connect with Paul on Twitter and on LinkedIn and on his website at peakchallenges.ch.

Hiya!

How you doing, man?

Doing good.

Good. Good to see you. Okay. To start off with, just thinking about where you are based, can you just tell us a little bit about what the Laser Center is about and where, you know, where it came from? What was, what was the origins?

Yeah, we're all about self-regulation, and I would say for both students and faculty members, we're trying to create an environment which people want to do professional development, find their own way, and work together and support each other. And that's really happening. The way we started out was with a, well, a couple of things. I mean, I started doing professional development here at the school. And one year led to the next, to the next, and we kept building. And then one year we had some equipment that was for free from Samsung, and they had told us they were going to research it. We actually researched it instead. The report that we got wasn't terribly favorable for that particular product, but it got me some recognition here. And from that, we actually created a lab school and The big point for LASER, actually, the LAS Educational Research, was when we started having residential scholars and visiting scholars.

Nice. When did that start?

That was 5 years ago. So, and I think they started about the same time by chance. We had one person from Japan who wanted to come and spend time with us after he was here. We looked at each other and sort of said, you know, we could certainly invite other people to come and work with us.

Nice. And how is that informing what you're doing with the students? I mean, what's the direct contact there? I mean, I've had the pleasure of being there as a visiting scholar, but maybe you could say a bit about the interaction with the students.

Well, it depends from one visiting scholar to the next. We're actually researching exactly this question right now, like what sort of community of practice do we develop from the visiting scholars being here? Yeah. It's big. Like right now, today, actually, the visiting scholar who was here has made such a good connection with a student from her same country. He unfortunately had a ski accident yesterday. He's in the hospital. And that visiting scholar took the train this morning to go be in the hospital for when the parents arrived.

Oh, wow.

So it's not like this person is a visiting scholar and not part of what we do here. In general, though, we run from visiting scholars who come and really just want to have sabbatical with a nice view away from wherever they're coming from. We've had a couple of folks operate like that, to people who are really, really involved in the community and involved like 24/7, like at a boarding school you are. Yeah, things from curriculum development and being in classes and sitting down with faculty. The initial interviews we've done for this research study have some common themes. One of them is the best connections are in the cafeteria. Slow down a little bit and talk to other faculty if they find, you know, interesting intersects of work and what they're interested in. Visiting scholars tend to be supported by resident scholars, our own internal staff working on special projects.

Yeah.

I've started to visit where visiting scholars have come from and work with them in their home countries. It's a big web now.

Yeah. That's great. And where does Agile fit in with that? So you mentioned it's a kind of a self-regulating entity, but how has the philosophy behind Agile informed what you're doing and the way you're structuring the center?

It's interesting because I started with building up this teacher professional development maybe 10 years ago here. Trying to do it in a way where those folks who self-selected, I would work with, and the ones that were into it, I would work with more. And at times I was criticized for like always, you know, working with the people who were sort of top end because people would say, well, you really need to work with the ones who are not interested and so on. Those are the ones who need the most help. But it's sort of the identify what is good and then grow from there.

Yeah.

Getting introduced to agility, that was a colleague of mine who was watching me struggle in a self-regulated experimental class, and he happened to be reading Jeff Sutherland's Sutherland's book with the 400% return. And he says, like, yeah, I read in the back of this book about EduScrum. So why don't you take a look? And yeah, at the time, Billy wasn't available, but he referred us to John Miller. Eventually, both of them have come here. They've been here 2 times, 3 times, both of them. And then this original thing of working with the faculty who are really on the upside and like climbing, Bill calls that— I believe I'm doing him justice here— he calls that uplift. Right. Which we've been part of our own version of what we see agility to be and working in a manner that's uplifting is definitely part of it.

Yeah.

It doesn't mean you're ignoring like some of those hard things to face and so on, or just concentrating on what's good and not going out to other areas, but it's like I was sort of struggling in the dark. Bill, uh, gave me a little bit of light and then together with a whole bunch of other people, we've been exploring what it means. Yeah.

Nice. Kind of shining a bit of light on those bright spots and letting that lift everything. Yeah. Interesting.

That's the uplift part. I mean, personally, like when I've interviewed I interviewed people about agility, I always ask them now, like, did you have a moment when it was really like a big aha for you? And I usually get that, yeah, there was like this specific time was when.

Yeah.

I don't know if I had that. I kind of like moved into it, but I remember one time Bill saying to me, I explained why I was irritated with something, some sort of process. And he said, ah, you know, there's no going back. You can't keep working like you used to in the past as you like adopted this new way. And I think that revolved around working in iterations in a real way. Yeah, starting a project with a plan but not a big plan. Man, I used to work with like, I thought I could just tease out all the details and put all the things, I had this great plan. And now much more we jump into things with a plan that we're ready to change almost immediately because that's what happens when you start working on something.

Yeah, but there's a lot of things in schools that are not necessarily geared that way, right? In terms of strategic planning process.

And you shall must be interviewing Bill because Bill would say Schools are one of the biggest push systems that you can imagine. Here's the curriculum, we're pushing that on you. Here's the timetable, that gets pushed on you. Here's when the test— here's what you should be interested in. You know, what, what we're trying to say with agility is that we really need to focus on pull. Yeah, we have kids working with a Kanban board or what might it be, and, you know, pull your next thing, and it runs counter to how a school is set up.

For sure. Yeah, absolutely. So just on a practical level, that's what you've been doing with the EDGE program, right?

It's coming on the heels of creating a 7th and 8th grade middle school, combined grade middle school. Yeah. Where we tried to work this way with some success. Now I have a 9th and 10th grade program, and it was another chance to take a crack at really putting a pull system into place as a program within a program in a traditional school. So here we have kids who decide what projects they're going to do, what they're going to focus on. Some of the pieces are teacher-led, but student choice. So they can choose to do something that they think will help them, but it's actually choosing to have a teacher-led piece. We've taken it, in my opinion, a little bit too far. Like, it's hard for me now to suggest that we actually do something that I know would be helpful.

You let them loose and you can't rein them back in.

Yeah, we've unleashed something here. But we have some big successes to point to. And the general thing of letting kids have time to flounder a little bit to find their way is, for me, a significant piece of the learning that they need anyway. Yeah, so I'm always worried, you know, if somebody with some authority or some sway looks and sees students not being able to get down to work and not knowing what they're doing or switching from project to project and so on, because they will interpret it maybe as wasted time in a school environment, at least our traditional school environment. Yeah, I'm convinced that we need that. And like, I was in the entrepreneurial class today. There's different classes, different folks, but with these folks who are creating businesses, I was watching a couple of kids sitting on the couch, like, just not getting much done. On the other hand, I've got this person who's made a catering business doing very well already independently. She was saying how much work she had to do, and I said, well, you need an employee. And she says, oh, I have one. Like, when I bought the first thing from her, she was like, great. You're like, here's the thing. And she said, well, how do I get paid? And I said, oh, well, you're gonna have to look up invoicing. So she's like, oh, invoicing, okay. It's not like we're leading with what we want to tell them or some sort of information for down the road. Yeah, it's like when they need to learn something, then they might ask us for some help.

For sure.

Yeah, this person is currently now working with our school, one of our school cafes, to get her product into the cafe. She's having to decide, does she, does she just sell directly to them? Is she doing a sort of assignment? If they buy her materials, what will it cost her? Is it better for her actually to go down to the store in the village? So great stuff. Like I could never have planned it better.

That's great. I mean, that's real, right? Those are real issues that she's got to resolve.

Yeah. So, so she's flying higher than I could have ever done, like being future directed. There's some flying lower than if they were future directed, but hopefully they're going to see and be jealous of this other person.

Yeah, sure. There is a risk in, in not controlling and constricting their time so rigidly. And like you say, there is important learning in those moments where they are floundering a bit. And they've got to figure out what to do.

Sure, but I think you could also say it's only a risk because of the way we frame school, right? Don't get something done. And why is that? It's because we've set up school like, don't waste a minute of this precious time. But we're constantly pushing them to the next thing and saying, you have 3 minutes for this, and we're switching tasks, and we're doing this. Oh my gosh, you know, like, back off and let them, like, figure out what they actually want to do. Yeah.

I mean, one of the questions would be, how have you carved out time for that within a traditional framework of quite an intense standards-based curriculum?

Right, I didn't really have to carve it out as much as it's a class right now in the elective period. So I didn't have to do any sort of carving, but I get feedback from other teachers, it'd be really nice if we had a longer amount of time, right? Because we, we're trying to do a pull system in a push system. So they're pulling a task and then we say, okay, we're pushing out the door, but it has room to grow that way.

Yeah, that's true.

Our goal is to add to the classes activities and maybe other supporting classes, summer programs, pieces that they can add so that they've rounded out into a 2-year program. The second year with a mentor so that they can continue with— if it's a business or an art project, wherever they're working, that they can continue that with a coach essentially on the side or a mentor, but under their own power. Then they can do it during class or after class. It's, yeah, that's the advantage of the boarding school, I guess, because they're here all the time.

Yeah.

And in terms of the support you've given them upfront, frameworks or tools that you are encouraging them to use, have you done any of that? Or like in terms of, like you mentioned, a Kanban board or other tools that your frameworks you might use?

I kept waiting with the Kanban boards. I didn't want to do it. When it turned them off and I still haven't actually formally introduced it. We gave them tools like requirements that they, every time that they built a 2-week plan for themselves, we gave them a requirement that they pulled in a certain sort of guidance sort of activity. And one of those was what we just called Agile Games. So any of the training games that you find online, some of them you hear about all the time and some of them are unique and interesting, you know, new if you look around a little bit.

Yeah.

And so the kids could decide, like, you know, when we meet on class on that day, we actually want to do this Agile game. And then that would be something I would lead sometimes with another teacher so that they were able to reflect about what Agility might mean. Like, we did an Easter egg game where they have to produce Easter eggs, and in one format they plan for 3 minutes and then they work for 6 minutes straight. So that was sort of a waterfall.

Yeah, yeah.

And then the next time they did it, they planned for a minute, worked for 2, planned for a minute, worked for 2. Same amount of time, but it becomes real obvious that if you stop what you're doing for a second and confer and collaborate. Yeah. So then we debrief that, and then I— part of what they have to do is occasional journal writing. And I was reading journals one time, and I was like, agility, you know, what is it? And some kids just nailing it in their own words. And then some kids like, you know, well, it's really important to be flexible, like for ski season. And yeah, didn't quite cut it with everybody. Those are the kinds of supports we've been giving them. I'd like to do more time of pulling them aside and saying, uh, let's look at how a Kanban board could help you here, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Kanban means maybe what are these 6 rules of Kanban that you might want to know about? And, and that is my goal for when they get All said and done, one of the outcomes is supposed to be that they're conversant about Scrum and Kanban and maybe Lean so they can actually get to some summer program where maybe it's talked about or something and they know.

Yeah, yeah.

Right now a lot of them don't know why they're working or that we're trying to ask them to work in the way they're working.

Yeah, I guess there's an aha moment for them at a certain point when they realize that there are people in organizations, corporations, companies all over the world who are struggling with the very same kind of issues about ways of working that they are in their class. And you know, that would be a neat thing to connect them with, is realizing that that's happening at the same time.

And that's the fuel that drives me, because when we hit one of those aha moments— it's like, I'm a pretty terrible golfer, right? But when you hit the green, it could be that you've had miserable shots all day long. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You hit the green, it's like, okay, I like golf again.

Yeah.

But I sort of jump from one one aha to the next.

Yeah, nice.

They're coming regularly enough that it's really keeping you going.

Yeah, good, man. That's— it's really exciting. And what's, what's been the response of parents to this? Because that obviously, that's for some people, that's always within education, is one of the reasons that the conservative forces that keep us in our push system, if you like, is, well, what are the parents going to say and how are they going to respond to this? What's been your, your experience with with EDGE?

We have the advantage and the curse of being boarding, right? So the parents aren't around, so like feedback is a little bit slower and so on. So I can like experiment a little bit longer. However, because they're not around, it's harder to educate them and talk to them and build some confidence. What I do is send out a weekly newsletter that updates things that are going on. There's always something positive to report. Like some parents that I've talked to when they are on campus have been really enthused, and I suspect it's the enthused parents that asked to sit down and talk to me. So maybe I'm missing some that aren't.

Sure.

There was one parent that sent an email lately, which was really nice, of like, I didn't get what you were doing, was generally the tone of the letter.

Okay.

But then added, you know, like, I'm starting to see, and I think I agree with you that this is important. And it's interesting because he has a high-flying student who probably always does well in school and always has and always will. So doing something where it's not like a content outcome, where here's this new thing learned and here's this next good grade on a test, but rather struggling to figure out what to do next and collaborating with folks and so on. Yeah, that particular parent came around. I had an interesting experience this week with a student who had told me, I told my mom that she didn't have to read the updates, right? She was asking, what's all this stuff coming to me every week? So I just told her she doesn't have to, which, you know, this is a 10th grade kid and that's how we were probably back then. But then just this past week he was like, "I want to organize this event." And he wanted to interview a visiting scholar here and couldn't quite believe that he wanted to do this, but he organized it, he met twice, he ended up interviewing 2 people, he met with them 2 times to prepare, he put on this event during a class, but We started inviting some other classes. We had 60 people there, right?

Nice.

He was sitting down interviewing these people, super nervous, right? Afterwards, absolutely on cloud nine, doing something of his own initiative. And this is the kind of kid, you know, the smart kid who's not quite engaged for whatever reason in school, and he could just ride along like that through every grade. But now in 10th grade in January, I think, I think we got them.

Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things I like about the Agile conversations that are happening all over is about transforming the world of work for the people doing it. So if you like take a shift to look at the teachers and the, you know, the staff in the school, there's a big emphasis on kind of human-centered values and the Agile mindset and trying to, you know, create dynamic self-organizing workplaces. How do you see that fitting with— so you've got a small team with the EDGE of teachers you're pulling in from other subject departments, have you?

I've got a couple of different teams. So the EDGE group is 5 teachers and me principally working together. And then there's the group that runs the research center that has some overlap, but that's another 5 of us and all of us with— that's kind of a part-time responsibility. And then I've got significantly this group of 8 Residential Scholars, and those are our own faculty who each year go— if they want to, they can apply to do something a little extra for their professional development. That's a plan that lines up with some of the goals that the school has, and then I work together with them in a role maybe as a co-writer or feedback person for something that they're writing, or assistance, um, being a listener to a presentation that they're going to give. And they get a bit of extra money so that we've just had people out at a middle school conference. We've published a couple of things this year with different resident scholars. One teacher published his first thing, got it, just got it accepted ever.

Great.

And he's on cloud nine. Nice.

Yeah, yeah.

And the trust that you get, like that one-on-one working together on something that the person actually wants to work on as professional development is huge. When he's feeling so positive about himself, he's developed more trust Yeah, and lately I brought a guest to the school to his class without proper warning, so he didn't know, right? We showed up and he had another teacher in the class because he was trying a Harkness method for the first time. And so, and you got to imagine, like, when you're a teacher doing something for the first time in front of students, you're cautious about bringing somebody else into the room, right? Especially environment where everybody shuts their doors all the time. So he had this other guy there, and then I show up as like the research guy with a guest. So there's 4 of us in the room, 3 of us as observers, and then he's doing Harkness. And at first it wasn't terribly smooth, nor terribly Harkness maybe, but the teacher he had brought in gave like one little piece of advice in the middle. It absolutely changed the tenor of what was going on. And then we were able to leave that class and he's again on cloud nine. It's like, I'm published. Right? It's huge stuff, right?

That's great. Practical examples of the kind of more enriching working environment that Agile seems to be focused on.

Absolutely. It's not a, and it's not a method in this case, right? But he's, he's demonstrating the trust you need. And that's, I think that runs through Agility nicely. You pull his own work to request that people give feedback and to work in iterations. He was actually not good at first when he was writing his article. It took forever because he was afraid to share it in a draft state. Yeah, right. What we tell the students all the time to do, right? But it's hard to do. But he got through it and got the positive feedback, getting it accepted. And then since then, he's told me of two other articles that he's interested in writing and actually sent one, which is like a page. It was just started, but he already shared it. This is a whole different mindset than what he had a year ago.

That's great. And are you— have you got a sense that it's kind of a contagion happening in LAS? Like, have you got other people coming on board with those small groups, the EDGE group and the research group?

Yeah, right. I'm influencing the broader culture by continuing to work with those who are buying in, and that group keeps getting bigger.

Good.

So I had a nice shout out in a staff meeting today when we were talking about professional development and plans for next year and so on. Someone to say, you know, like the, the original program that everybody has to do here is, is one of our internal PD programs. He said that one and being a residential scholar, those are the best PD experiences I've had in my life. Said it'd be, it's hard for me to remember even what happened in some of the other ones. Yeah. If, if you get enough people interested, then you can't avoid that, at least the topic anymore so much. Right. And I think this past summer before the contract period for teachers started, we ran a Scrum Master training with John Miller. And we had 17 faculty members there. So they're all coming before they had to be there. That's great.

I had a very interesting conversation with one of the early advocates of Agile in education, Steve Peha. And this was like 10 years ago, almost 2011, when he was giving a talk at Yahoo. And, you know, really extolling the virtues of what Agile could do in schools and in school districts. Super interesting. And then a decade passed and it's like, okay, what happened? So it's just really encouraging to hear that there are things really moving now. It feels like there's a lot of connections that are being made now with what's going on in the organizations related to Agile and in schools, which seem to be a lot of the same conversations, but they've been happening in quite siloed ways for a while, and people haven't made the connections across those boundaries.

It feels like a movement, but you always have to be a little careful because, you know, you, you start following social media, the people that kind of think like you, but it does feel like a movement. And I like the fact that there are folks who have quite a prescriptive step-by-step, maybe they do scrums, you know, is towards that end of the spectrum. Others who are just very much mindset, love the stuff that Igor is doing. I mean, they're definitely informed by Agile, but they're not trying to step through a particular process.

Okay.

It's just, just really, they're like doing edge all day long, year long.

Yeah.

And that's not something that would be appropriate for us here, but it's, it's definitely informing how I'm working on things. And it also gives me the, the trust in myself that I'm not like leading people into just a— yeah, there is a purpose to this. And if a school can do it 100%, there's probably ways partly and still have some benefit from it.

Yeah, nice. We've discussed in the past about the NEASC protocol, you know, the new ACE learning protocol that New England Association of Schools and Colleges have come out with. How do you see that as supporting what you're doing there? Because I can see there's a lot of connections between that framework and what you're doing, right?

Okay, so I have a little funny story. It's a little story, maybe also a little funny, I'm not sure. We had a training here at our school for multiple schools, and as the training went on, it became apparent that a lot of what this particular accreditation is actually pushing, which is something sort of unique to accreditation, that they actually are taking a stand about a certain way of teaching and learning. Yeah, what they're pushing was very much in line with a lot of the stuff we've been doing, and I think there are some of those who are not on the same page with me here at school. I was sitting in the back and I was getting lots of heads turning and looking at me like, you know, one head would turn and go like, "Yeah, see, yeah, we're doing the right thing," and then I'd get a kind of a furtive glance from another person like, "Oh God, don't encourage this guy." Paul's been banging on about this stuff for months. But no, I do think it's saying, like, it seems to be saying, like, if you can work in ways of having much more student agency fundamentally, Yeah. Figure out how to do that because that's what we want to see in your school. Yeah. And agility, of course, is about having agency of those people involved in the work, the people who are doing the work, having decision-making power about the work and, you know, deciding the order in which things get done, what gets done, and checking in a lot about it. It fits into education so clearly that I'm not surprised that there's an accreditation process that would value that. I'm quite pleasantly surprised that they're brave enough to actually advocate for it.

Yeah, well, this is the thing, right? Exactly. And I think there's still some unresolved tensions about an accreditation being somehow inherently a push system, and they're trying to allow very much a pull system to develop within schools, but then they've still got to finally accredit schools. You know, this is— it's not an entirely unresolved tension there, but I agree with you, it's a brave move.

And I would just say, like, well done, and then stay the course because it's going to be so easy to start compromising when people, you know, are not sure if they should continue down a path where they're getting some grief, right? Those faces that turned to me with the looks of like, oh no.

Yeah.

Um, there's a lot of, a lot of people out there that would feel that way. And in many cases for very good reasons, you know, but yeah, absolutely.

And I've, I mean, I've even, I've even had the experience working with a school that was was pushing so confidently and consciously down the ACE pathway and then actually were pulled back in by the local accrediting authorities there to say, you know, hey, you're going too far, too fast away from the kind of the standards-based system, the knowledge-based system that we have. So just rein it back in. So there is tensions within the system that need to be resolved because it is a disruptive force to some extent, this idea of allowing classes, students or whole schools to develop their own pull-based systems where, you know, things will develop in agile ways, not the standardized model that we're used to.

Yeah, you're right, but the standardized model that we're used to, and we probably both agree on this, needs some disrupting.

Absolutely.

Not like it's not serving its purpose. I suppose you could have a year of podcasts about what the purpose of school is, but it feels like we could be doing so much more. Like, why settle for what we have right now if we really could be doing a lot more? And yeah, so if there's If there's an accreditation agency that's willing to push it, then I really want to support that. And if there are people working in different ways, how they are interpreting agility, I'd like to support them all and see what they can get out of it.

Yeah, definitely.

I agree.

And then just as a final thought, if a teacher was listening and coming new to this stuff completely, where would you point them as a kind of a good place to start finding out about Agile and agility in education as a kind of a start point?

Man, I wish I had written the thing that I would point them to, but I, I do some training that I tell people this is informed by agility and by what we've written about it and so on. But if you want to just get an idea of what's going on, I always send them to the EduScrum Guide, which is now available in a whole bunch of different languages. It's just the easiest way to say, here are these things and steps, and it's explained to you within whatever, they're 15, 20 pages. Then you have an idea of what to do. I don't, I certainly don't think that you need to be doing EduScrum to be calling yourself Agile or to be working in this area and so on. I don't think Lily or anybody else with EduScrum would say so too. But if you're, if you want to like get something that's a step-by-step and feel like you've got an overview of what would happen, uh, you can conceptualize it quickly. To put it into practice is something that you, once you start, you keep working on forever.

Yeah, and you can definitely see some pretty quick rewards with the students.

I think so. I mean, in my experience, I've seen quick rewards with some students. I read sort of with jealousy and doubt at the same time some of the stories of like, you know, like super success, like, ooh, it transformed everything. It's like, it's always pretty messy at school. Yeah, yeah, that's just the world we live in, and it's okay, and it shouldn't stop anybody from trying to experiment a little bit. It's going to be messy and not serve everybody, and yeah, That is okay.

And also I, it would be great just to highlight the idea that any kind of transformation, even though it's kind of given this mystique of suddenly it's miraculous and it's instantaneous, actually transformations are pretty messy and take a lot of work and don't happen all at once, all in the same moment. And that's kind of Agile too, right?

Absolutely. I had a debrief with a teacher I've been working with for a long time this week where what he was doing did not work so well.

Right.

We've all been there.

Yeah, for sure.

And he kept referring to like, but We did it this way before and this worked and this worked. And it's like, well, this time it didn't. Like, let's, let's talk about why we've learned something more. The beauty of that is it's baked right into agility. You expect that to happen.

For sure. Well, thank you very much. You are definitely out there giving some practical examples of, you know, what's possible in schools. I would definitely encourage anyone to pop in if they can in your beautiful spot up there in the mountains. Awesome. Paul, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

Cheers. Great.

Nice.

Thanks, man.

Okay.

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