Agile Mindsets in the Classroom - A Conversation with Jessica Cavallaro and Roslynn Jackson

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

This is something that makes your life easier. It is a win-win for everyone. You don't have to know it all to be able to try it. Agile is the methodology. You can do it now. You can give your kids some of that power now and you can learn as you go. The more you know, the more you practice it, the better you get. And it's the same way for your students.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. This week I'm speaking with Jessica Cavallaro and Roslyn Jackson, who are both teachers at the Pinecrest School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Jessica is an innovative educator and curriculum designer who brings the agile mindset into the classroom. She's a champion of project-based learning and creating purposeful educational experiences both in and outside of the classroom. Jessica has delved into applying Agile and Scrum to keep students connected, collaborating, and creating while teaching in a hybrid setting, and she is passionate about developing better systems that put students first in education. Roslyn is an educator who believes failures are the stepping stones to success. She's the co-founder with Jessica of The Agile Mind, which strives to help teachers learn to use an Agile mindset to help students acquire the skills they need to solve real-world problems while learning educational concepts. Rosalind believes that using Agile skills with students and helping other educators to do the same is the way to transform our education framework into one that truly prepares our learners for the real-world challenges ahead of them and to give them the tools to do it. This episode also includes some excerpts from students at Pinecrest School talking about their experiences in Rosalind and Jessica's classrooms.

Hi, Jess.

Hey, how are you?

Hey, Jess. Yeah, I'm good. How are you?

Nice to see you.

Nice to see you. Hi, Ros.

Hey, how are you guys?

Good. Thank you for joining me. It's just a real pleasure to be able to talk to you both. And one of the things I'm particularly excited about is I spend a lot of great conversations on the podcast talking to different thought leaders and innovators in education, but, you know, not so much time spent talking with teachers who are at the coalface doing the real hard work and the real great work of working with our kids. And so it's really, I think, an important part of the picture. I'd love to get your perspective on the work you've been doing with Agile, using Agile methods in the classroom and through Jeff Bernstein's work with LEAF and through that framework. So thank you very much for joining me.

Thank you for having us.

Brilliant. So let's, I mean, let's start with some of the backstory, which we've discussed before, but just for the listeners to hear, what was it for you that sparked this need? To look for something slightly different in the way that you were teaching, your pedagogy you were using, but also what was the draw then of some of the Agile stuff? So there's kind of two parts to that.

Okay, so I've always been a non-traditional teacher. I've always been involved in design thinking and project-based learning and really kind of pushing the envelope as to bringing real life skills into the classroom. And of course, everything came to a halt last spring when COVID hit the whole world and we all just stopped and our kids went hybrid and none of us knew what to do with that. So we adjusted as quickly possible, but what was lost was that connection with our students, was relationships, was just the overall human contact in education. And so my kids, one of their tasks that they had to do while they were on hybrid learning was to create these time capsules, and I said, write me a diary piece, write me something and tell me what's going on in your life, how are you spending the quarantine, and it was unbelievable how sad kids were and how disconnected and lonely they were. And so when the year ended and you got time to reflect, I called last summer my summer of learning. And I said, I need to learn something that's going to make this all better, something that's going to prepare me for the next school year. Cause we didn't know if we were going to be distance or in-person or hybrid or what was going to happen. And through kind of serendipity, an email arrived and it said, do you want to learn Scrum? And I said, oh, that is, that's a really funny word. Let's figure that out. After about 10 minutes of research, I realized, I was like, oh my God, there's, there's adults in the world that do what I do in terms of project management. I just didn't know that it really existed. And I said, like, this is it. And I jumped in immediately, found EduScrum. I started reading about— I started reading the Scrum books, I started reading the Agile books, I read the principles, the core values.

And I—

and it became more and more apparent to me every time I read something else that this was what was necessary in education to keep my kids collaborating and connected, to keep them learning, and to keep them engaged through whatever we were going to be traveling through in the next couple of years. Because who really knew how long this was going to last. I was lucky enough to connect with Willie through EduScrum, and he helped guide me as I kind of launched in myself. And I started EduScrum in August, and it was tricky at first. You know, it's bringing this whole new framework in, but immediately it showed its value. I had a hybrid classroom, so I had half my kids at home and half my kids in class. They were connecting through Zoom every day. They were leading their own discussions. The best part about it was that I was having more one-to-one face time with all of my students than I've ever had before. 'cause they were working in their own autonomous groups, and then I was free to circulate around and really have those connections and conversations and teach to what the kids actually needed instead of teaching whole group instruction that some kids already knew and some kids needed a remedial part of. So you really got to know your kids better. And then halfway through the year, I met Jeff Bernstein through LEAF, and he said, would you like to go on an agile journey, an agile learning journey? And I was like, Yeah. So I asked Roz to come with me and we jumped into learning Kata and learning Kanban. And so through the last quarter, my kids transitioned from EduScrum to Agile and Kanban and handled it like rock stars. And in a year that has been so, so really difficult for so many educators and for all students, I honestly can say that my kids have made deeper connections They have a better understanding. They have developed better executive functioning skills and interpersonal skills. And this has honestly been my best year as an educator. So while I know that there is so much struggle going on in education right now, this really blossomed and brought something so uniquely beautiful into my classroom that I think can be replicated everywhere.

That's amazing. Yeah, brilliant. Wow, what a claim for this to be your best year ever, given everything that we've just experienced. Still are experiencing. That's amazing. So, I mean, I'd love to dig into some of those specifically with some later questions, but Roz, if I could just invite you.

Honestly, the spark was Jessica. Like Jessica, I do project-based learning in my class. I'm not typically a textbook teacher. If the kids are bored, I'm bored. So as much as I could this year, as safely as possible, trying to get them to do projects, but of course they were modified, trying to involve the kids at home. Giving them like alternative types of things that we could do to the things in class. So it was definitely a struggle for a teacher like me that always has them up in groups, moving around, to be able to continue to make science fun. But we were able to do it for the most part. But knowing Jess, knowing that she is the same way that I am in my classroom, when she came to me and said, hey, do you want to do this Agile training with me? I'm a person, I did not know what Agile was. I thought agile was like, oh, are we going to do stretching? Because Jess likes to work out. So, and then she's like agile for the classroom. I'm like, okay, what is that? So kind of like how she felt about Scrum. I'm like, it's agile, but I had no clue what it was, but I know Jessica. So if it's something where she says it's for the classroom, I'm going to be all in because I know it's going to benefit the kids. That's it. So getting on board with her to do the training with Jeff Burstein for LEAF That was eye-opening for me to see that this is something that I saw it helped me first. And I think that was important too. I saw the difference in my personal life for my personal goals that I could do. So something where it kept me on track with things I had been working on for years, I'm ashamed to say, and it helped me get over the finish line for some of those things in the couple of months that we were working on this before we actually introduced it to the class. So, for me, going into the classroom already knowing it could work, I think it's something that gave me confidence to try something new with these 7th graders, where any teacher knows kids are going to be honest. If it does not work, they will tell you. So, me being able to tell them, hey, I've tried this, I know it may not be easy, it may not be your first choice, but try this, and I promise you, you're going to see it, you're going to feel it.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I love that, that you've, yeah, you experienced the success yourself. And I hear that so often with many of these techniques that, I mean, you can apply them in all sorts of different contexts, right? Just from self-management as an adult at home with the shopping, with the to-do lists, in any aspect of life, but definitely. So I'd love to then go a bit deeper because I think there's two parts to this. One of my questions is about the jargon around Agile, and you both have reflected on that as Scrum, as Agile, Kanban, what all these words mean. So I'd love to come to that in a moment, but first, perhaps for all the teachers listening to this, because clearly you were both already somewhat geared towards a more kind of collaborative project-based approach, but in terms of what you had to adapt or change, maybe if we could take it in stages, thinking about your planning and then how that affects the way you are in the classroom and then, and then the assessment as well. So just kind of thinking through that kind of learning arc. Of a unit, could just say a bit about what specific things that meant for the way that your practice changed to fit in with some of these techniques.

So I am always a person that uses backwards design. So I think about what my learning goals are and then I design my whole unit backwards. So I, I've been teaching civics, which is US government and US history for 11 years now. So I know what my content is and I know the different strategies to get. So I always start with what is a big idea I want my kids to walk away from and what are the smaller ideas that need to lead up to it. And that's how I kind of craft a unit. So in terms of having to shape things, I always start with an essential question. And in the beginning of the year when I did Scrum, Scrum has these 5 rituals that must be followed. And so there's sprint planning, there's the sprint itself, which is the work, there's a sprint review, a sprint retrospective, what am I saying? Oh, and the daily scrum. So the kids coming together. So those fit really well into a unit. So the kids, I would give them, the essential question, I would make up my rubrics so that they would have them right at the beginning. And then I would have the supplemental material and the skills that I knew that they needed to build in. But I would put that all into a document that I called a task grid. And so they could go and plan it backwards themselves. So in Scrum, they took the essential question, they looked at the rubric, and then they had to piece together how they were going to complete these things to get to the end. So they've had to build their own path. So what this gave them was more autonomy. So instead of me saying, okay, today's our first day of the unit, we're going to do this, then it's the next day and we're going to do this, and I was setting the pace and I was telling them what to do and what the checkpoints were. There's still checkpoints, there's still standards, the skills are still there, they're still being assessed on content. So this is not some free-for-all because lots of times teachers, when they hear about project-based learning, just think, you know, I hand the kids a bunch of construction paper and then sit back and wait for a mess to unravel. There is a lot of structure in it. The kids do do deep learning, and I have to ensure that that learning is, is taking place. But with Scrum and Agile, I'm giving them much more autonomy because they have to do certain things, but they decide when they're doing them and they create their own path of learning to be able to answer the end goal. And if they can answer their essential question by the end, then the project's done, then it's done, because then they have reached that learning goal. So I don't necessarily care how they get to that goal. They have to plan it themselves. And that's part of the skills that Scrum and Agile really gives our kids, is the ability to make decisions by themselves. They have to manage time, they have to organize themselves, they have to take big chunks of information and break it into smaller chunks. So it's bringing in all of these essential life skills that aren't explicitly taught in school, and it's combining them with their content and their student skills so that they're becoming— they're emerging as more well-developed human beings that are ready to function in the world than just kids that can walk around and tell me about the Continental Congress that got together in the 1700s and what George Washington was wearing that day. No one cares.

No, no, definitely. And that breaking that, you know, breaking the epic down into those tasks, taking a big chunk and breaking it down into the smaller parts, is a huge skill. And it's something that the students in my experience always find difficult at the beginning, right?

Did you—

first time it took them 2 weeks. And so I see kids every other day. I'm on block schedule, so I see them for 80 minutes every other day. And it took them 2 weeks. So I introduced the flap and I said, now we have an epic, now we have stories, now we have tasks. They drew them the mountain that Lily taught me. I did all the things that I was supposed to do and they all just looked at me and they're like, what? We ran through it together and we modeled it. And so it's like, how do you write an essay? So your essay is your epic. So what do you have to do first? You have to do research, you have to find a claim, you have to write it, you have to get background information. And so we— I showed them how you were breaking it down into smaller and smaller and how you were color coding it into the flap. And then, then it started to dawn on them, but it really was a trial and error. And it was one of those things that at the beginning of the year, the kids had to get used to the fact that they could fail and then come back and redo it. So they could make it up, bring it to me, and I could say, hey, did you think of this? What about that? How are you pacing that? And then they could redo it and no one was mad at them. So it really— setting up that flap was really difficult for them, but it really set the tone for the rest of the year that it's not punitive, it's all learning.

That's brilliant. But cumulative, and you know, they're learning from that and they get better each time. And that's, I mean, that's part of the kind of agile mindset in that iteration anyway, right?

At the end of the year, the flap took under a class period. So 60 minutes is incredible.

Yeah. And Russ, Perhaps could I ask you about the assessment piece? Because how much autonomy did you give them over that part of it? Was that, you know, as Jess has talked about them finding their routes through, did you give them different options in terms of performance-based assessments or they, they could come up with their own assessments for that? Or was, is that an endpoint that you set as part of it?

Both actually. Yes, they were able to come up with their own assessments. What Jessica and I did was similar, but I did a little bit of a tweak. Again, because I started the final quarter, where Jessica had been doing this all the way through, I knew I had a fixed date. So I actually gave them fixed timelines in it. My students weren't able to identify their own timelines. And so that's one of the regrets that I have from this year is that I did not start as early. So because of that, the students still had a unit that they had to self-teach. They had certain criteria that they had to meet. The unit was about rocks and minerals. So they had to come up with a lesson that included 6 different topics that they were required to cover. Each team had a topic, so there were 6 teams per class, and they had 4 major things that they were required to hit, 4 different skill sets that they were required to hit. One of those was that they had to actually design an assessment for the lesson that they had to teach. So in a sense, yes, they had to come up with the assessment. They had to come up with a hands-on practical lab that they had to do because by this time of the year, some of our restrictions had been, you know, relaxed a little bit. So the lab, we still took precautions about what they could bring, how many people could touch it, you know, those kinds of things. A lot of it was outside, which was better, but they had to come up with the classroom assessment for their peers. And then I was assessing them based on their research skills, the rigor of the assessment that they did. It couldn't just be just like a Kahoot with basic questions. It had to have some substance to those questions. Some of them were short answer questions. The lab activities, they had to understand the purpose of the lab and what they were doing and how it connected. I did weekly checkpoints with them to make sure that they were meeting with their teams. Those were different forms of assessments. Some of them were where I was going around to each group and it was just like a discussion so I could see what they were doing. One of them was more of, I guess, a traditional kind of online test where it was basically, okay, are you getting these major concepts that you have to get, like what is a rock, what is a mineral, what are the characteristics, just a few questions to make sure, okay, are you just picking the first link that you see on Google, or do you understand what these things are? And that was a light bulb moment for a lot of them too, that they were only researching one thing, but they did not connect the dots. So that was illuminating for a lot of the teams as well. Then another one was they had to make sure to give written feedback. Okay, what are you personally doing to make sure that your group is successful? What was your plan? What worked? What didn't work? So they had different formats of the assessments as well. And then, of course, they had to continue to talk with the group. Okay, we know what we answered. What did you answer? Oh, wait, I was supposed to do this. Well, what happened, and how do we check this? And then you see the conversations going back and forth. And then there's that urgency of, uh-oh, we have to present this. In about a week and a half. Let's get on it. And then, so that helped as well. And then, of course, the final assessment grade for me was their overall presentation. How did everything flow? So if you're claiming to me that you were conversing with the people in your group and you were working together, but when you present it's disjointed, that's part of your assessment as well. Were you actually collaborating? And then after their main presentation, then they had a final reflection that they had to do as well so they could talk about the things that worked well? What other things did you learn from another group? What other things did you learn just about collaboration in general within your group? Besides the content, what did you learn about working with other people? So that was, to me, the final kind of assessment was your overall reflection about the entire process and how did it go.

Yeah, brilliant. And what I love about it is it's so multi-layered, right? You've got so many things going on all at the same time, but because of this invisible structure that Jess spoke about it frees you as the educator up to be kind of administering many of those layers all at the same time because you've, you've kind of relinquished a lot of that initial superficial responsibility for delivering content, right? And so you've got all these things going on, which is— and I, I love that. And, you know, you both talked about the rigor academically, that there's deep rigor in it and there's a lot of knowledge and there's all sorts of different techniques you're using to track that and assess that and support developing understanding, but at the same time you've got all these amazingly rich skills-based things happening as well. Just one question on that: what was your experience about the kind of the way that Agile and Scrum uses the visibility and the transparency idea? I mean, you've spoke a bit about it, Ros, but how did the students respond when, yeah, all the group members can see the progress and see if somebody's not pulling their weight or if, you know, the team's not moving? How do the students respond there?

Honestly, there was some drama, but what I think as a teacher, like I will admit, newer to this, I kind of like having them have a little drama and figuring it out. Cause I'm like, why should adults have all the fun? You guys are going to have to get used to this anyway. So, you know, before there was chairs thrown and blood drawn, you know, you go over there and you're like, okay, hey, let's take it down for a minute. Are you hearing what this person is saying? Okay. She's not saying that she hates you. She's saying that this one thing was supposed to be done and it wasn't. Is there a reason why? Is there a way that we can do this better? What do you think this could have done, or you could have done? What could your response have been to this? Yes, we understand that you have a cross practice. Did you let your team members know you have a cross practice? And okay, great, you have a cross practice. They had band practice the other day, so how are we going to make sure that this miscommunication does not happen again. And the end goal is still there. You still have to present in about a week and a half. How are we going to solve this problem? What can we do? And then just asking those questions, letting them talk. There's still a little more, well, he was supposed to do this and he was supposed to do that. That's great, but how do we get to the end point? What are we going to do to make sure that we're successful with this? And some groups, they figured out those problems on their own. And there was probably honestly about 2 or 3 groups overall where you really had to be the referee and try to teach them how to communicate. And quite frankly, that's the way adults are too. Not every group communicates well.

Absolutely.

But it was, it was a learning experience. And those groups actually reflected upon that. They said, you know what, this is the reason why I'm not, I hate working in groups, but this process and using the Kanban board actually helped us to get to the goal. So to me, that's a win. You recognize it. You may not be a group person, but hey, now I have access to this tool that can help me at least better communicate. Yeah.

Amazing. And Jess, did you find similar things with the Kanban and the visibility of the workflow?

So the first thing that really helped me was because I started with EduScrum is the kids had to have a definition of done. And that really helped at the beginning when they were learning it, because one of the first groups came to me and said, we did our research cards, but so-and-so did hers and they're not good. And we don't want the grade. And I said, well, you need to sit down and have a conversation about what your definition of done is. And is everyone in the group meeting the requirements of what done is? And they were like, oh, that's why we did that. So that became a conversation with the group. Is all of your work meeting the criteria before it hits me? Because I'm the product owner, I'm the end goal. So I'm evaluating and there's no going back. So are you all hitting the definition of done? That was really great for them. But then once the time week evolved to the Kanban, they really enjoyed seeing who was doing what. And we kind of let them, because Roz and I were learning the Kanban board as we were teaching it. We're not experts. So we kind of were like, hey, explore it, see what you can do. And so immediately kids started color coding. They, they were like, I'm the red cards, you're the green cards, you're the blue cards. Kids started assigning them. Kids started putting in due dates that were hard due dates. You could hear the conversations because while I wasn't requiring a daily scrum anymore, they were coming into the class and kind of running their own daily scrum. See where they were, they were sitting there looking at the board and going like, why didn't you pull your cards to done? You know she's not going to grade them yet. So they were having this kind of conversation. And because my kids had gone through it all year, I, by the last quarter, I let them do something that I've never let students do before, and that was work outside of classes. So I have 6 different classes, and usually your groups are within one class so they can work together. And I said, what— because I trust you and because there's transparency and communication and we've been working on this, you can choose group members outside of your classes. So we had kids all different parts of the day that were working on one project. And so it forced that transparency because I said, you can have this freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility, and that means you need to be communicating on your Kanban board. And they were able to pull it off. So that really kind of brought it together because they couldn't just turn to the desk next to them and be like, "Psst, did you do your homework?" Because the first kid had class at 7:30 in the morning and the last kid had class at 3:30 in the afternoon. They have to know where they are in the project to make sure their things are getting put together. So Kanban really opened up that transparency. Never mind, I could log in at any point. It could be 9 o'clock at night and I could be like, "Are checkpoints going?" And I can kind of scroll through the boards and see what's moving and see who I need to have an emergency meeting with and who who needs communication, and it's all right there, color-coded, ready to go. So it eases that communication of the teacher too, where I don't have to sit on top of groups and constantly be like, what are you doing? You know, and nudging, because I can see, but from back here, so they still have that agency.

That's brilliant. And all right, let's get onto this jargon question then, because I know there is a lot of different terminology that you've used already, and even in this conversation, and just going back to one of your very initial points, I completely agree that you can see there's so much parallel between the way that Agile is used in organizations and businesses and companies and the way that clearly our young people need to be able to do this work, right? Deep work of collaboration. And it's challenging, as you said, Ros, and they've got to learn this, but all of the jargon often puts people off from even getting in the door. Because it's like, what? It's just a barrier to entry, I find, sometimes for people. So what would you say to teachers who are kind of looking at all this, listening to all this language that they're not familiar with, that may be off-putting?

If I can, I'll jump in.

Please, yeah.

I'm a person that I kind of like to keep it simple. So honestly, that's why I think it's really good to do it, especially with your students, by modeling. And I think it's good if your quote-unquote students are other teachers who are new to it. And I'm speaking from the perspective of a person that did not know what Agile was before April. Yeah. Okay. And I was able to do it, introduce it to my kids and see success with my students. And I had no idea what it was before then. So my thing is, if you go in with an attitude of no fear, remembering being Agile is not about knowing all of the terminology. Yes, you want to, as teachers and educators, you kind of want to be the smart person in the room, right? With these students. But the thing is being Agile is about your thought process. It's about the methodology. It's about how you go about thinking about that process. How are you trying to add value to what you were trying to do? How are you trying to get to that next step, that next iteration? How are you going to run that experiment to see if what you are planning works? And if it doesn't, that's still good because now you get to try the next thing in order to get you to that next point. It's not about if you're doing Scrum or if you're using the Kanban board. It's about, are you collaborating, connecting, working together, communicating? Pivoting if it doesn't work, and doing all of those things to make sure that you're reaching that objective. If you use the wrong vocabulary, so what? Did you get there? Okay, great. Let's celebrate. It's done. And onto the next. I think that's the mentality that I've taken with it. And this is coming from a self-proclaimed control freak. You gotta learn to release some of that and think about, I'm trying to get to the end goal. How do I get there? And as an educator, your students don't know the terminology either. So you are in control within your four walls. When you see what those students are capable of doing, you can learn the terminology as you go. We didn't know the terminology using Kanban at first and all of the different types of things that you could do on the board. We didn't know that at first. We just knew this is going to be awesome for our kids. We're going to let them play with it because quite frankly, a lot of them are way more fearless than we are anyway. And the results that we got showed it.

Yeah. Amazing. Jess, did you want to add anything on that?

Yes.

I mean, when I spoke to Willie last August, I was about to launch into the year and he was like, you know, you're not telling the kids you're, you're doing Scrum, right? You know, because the kids don't know what that is and they don't care what that is. They trust you when you build that relationship with them at the beginning of the year that you're going to take them and they're going to emerge better and they trust you. You. So you don't need to put the labels on it. So did I tell the kids they were doing a stand-up meeting? Yeah, I did. But I didn't tell the kids, not until really the last day of school, did I say, do you know that you've been doing the same things your parents do at work? You know, and it kind of was coming full circle to them. But at no point— they knew what a Kanban board was because they saw it. They knew what a Flap was. They knew there was a stand-up meeting. But I wasn't throwing— I wasn't like, you're the Scrum Master and you're the Product Owner and this is the process and we do things. It had nothing to do with words. It all had to do with the system. And that's what I really loved about this from the beginning, was that we didn't know where this year was going with the pandemic, and I saw it that I could install this system over my curriculum and over my skills curriculum, and that no matter what happens, if we all went back into lockdown, if we stayed in hybrid, if we all came back, no matter what happened in the world, this system would still run. So it doesn't matter what the system is called. The protocols are in place that no matter where we all are, we can all come together and collaborate and make connections and create. And that was, that was like the light bulb moment for me. So it, so while I did learn the terminology, just because I'm a dork, I just like to learn. I learned the terminology and I took the Scrum Master test just because I, that's just me, but that doesn't mean anyone else has to. I tell Roz all the time, you don't need to study for this. Who's going to ask you for this ever? No one is.

I just love it. That's brilliant. Yeah, no, I'm a dork too. Definitely. But what I like about what you just said is that the responsibility is on us to kind of invite people in with the language that we use. So we, in the way that we use the language with the students, or if we're talking about this with other colleagues, to, you know, to invite them into it. But also that idea that actually when you do start hearing some of the language, that makes real connections with industry, like you said, with parents who are using this. And that's some of the most powerful things is that, yeah, young people in school are doing this you know, they're more, sometimes more advanced with these processes and systems, whatever you do call them, than people are who are going through these agile transformations in their companies, who, you know, are more fixed onto their previous processes and don't want to let go of the way that it's always been done. And actually the kids are more kind of agile by nature, right?

At the beginning of the year, my first unit is the social contract theory, you know, Locke and Hobbes and Rousseau. And so their essential question was, How do you distribute power in a stable society? And they could take that any way that they wanted to. And I can tell you that half of my groups decided to redo the educational systems in America because they hated the way that education was structured. And every presentation had to do with, we want to learn real-world things. We don't want to take calculus. We want to learn how to do our taxes. We want to learn how to do the stock market. We want to understand our government. We want to understand— so these kids are telling you that they want real-world skills. And so when you're telling them along the way, 'cause you know, after doing Scrum for 3 quarters and introducing them to Agile and Kanban in the 4th quarter, there was a lot of kids that were like, I don't wanna do your Kanban thing, Jessica, we don't wanna do it. I said, listen, this is something that adults use. Like you're going to go into the industry and you're going to see this. People run daily standups every day. This is how adults function in the world in Fortune 500 companies. And that was really a buy-in for them because as much as they don't want to learn certain things, if you give them purpose in using a Kanban board or learning these skills, they jump in. There's so much more engagement and enthusiasm. So our kids are asking for this.

One thing I would add on to that too is you don't want to pile on just more stuff. So what we are trying to explain to other educators, and particularly for me, for someone who came in later to this than Jessica, this is something that makes your life easier. This is something that makes your classroom more engaging for students. It is a win-win for everyone. You don't have to know it all to be able to try it. And if you are willing to get the training, the basics in small chunks, or do the entire training like we did, that is your choice. But the thing is, if Agile is the methodology, you can do it now. You can give your kids some of that power now, and you can learn as you go. The more, you know, the more you practice it, the better you get. And it's the same way for your students. So context matters as well. You don't just throw it all up there and be like, okay, here it is. We're going to do Scrum and Kanban. No, Jessica didn't tell them they were doing Scrum. Jessica said, hey, you are going to try to redo our social contract theory.

How do you do that?

And then they actually did it. And then you tell them, okay, oh my gosh, we did this, we're amazing. And now they're empowered and they're less afraid as they're going to do it again with another real-life application.

Amazing. So good. I mean, and I, one of the things I wanted to do with this conversation partly was just for other people to be able to hear the passion with which you guys talk about this and the, you know, clearly the impacts that it's had that you've seen in your classroom. Thank you so much for being part of the conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for all your time.

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