Origins of Agile in Education - A Conversation with Steve Peha

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Agile is not really a software methodology. It came about that way because our projects got so large and complex that we couldn't learn enough about them fast enough to keep from making multimillion-dollar mistakes. And so Agile is really fundamentally a learning methodology.

With increasing numbers of people investigating the potential of Agile in education, it was fantastic to be able to finally speak with Steve Pihá, who was one of the early proponents of what Agile can bring to innovative teaching and learning. Steve is the founder of Teaching That Makes Sense, an educational consultancy specializing in literacy, student engagement, and instructional innovation. He has written extensively on developing young people's literacy and has written multiple award-winning award-winning book, Be a Better Writer, which he wrote with his wife, Margo Carmichael Lester. Steve's new novel, Jordan's Run, won the 2019 Spark Award at New York's BookCon. Since starting Teaching That Makes Sense in 1995, Steve has written widely on teaching and learning for publications like the Washington Post, the National Journal, and Edutopia. In June 2011, Steve wrote a very prescient piece for InfoQ entitled Agile Schools: How Technology Saves education, just not the way we thought it would. Around the same time, he spoke at Yahoo and Google and PayPal on the same topic of introducing agile strategies into education. In his early career, Steve held top management positions with several tech companies, was the founder of Music Technology Associates, and worked on various large-scale software development projects, often with links to education. Please do reach out to Steve on Twitter @StevePihaj or on LinkedIn, or you can find him on Facebook. Don't forget, if you enjoy the episode, please leave us a 5-star review on your podcast platform.

Hi.

Hey, how are you doing?

Fine, thank you. Good.

I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for agreeing to this.

I hope I don't disappoint. I'll be as charming and provocative as I can.

Perfect. Yeah. All right. So where I just, I wanted to start was in my original research into Agile in education, you came up seeming to be one of the early trailblazers in this area with your talk at Yahoo in 2011. And it was a great talk and so many interesting insights in that talk, which I think are just so relevant now, but it got me interested into your background and how you got to that place. As an educator, but also coming from the tech industry. So I would be really interested if you could just speak just for a little bit about how you arrived at that point in 2011. And then, sure, um, dig into this last decade.

You're right, it was a very early thing. I didn't realize that at the time. I actually wrote an article in InfoQ that preceded that, and then I talked at Google and PayPal and so forth. So I have worked in the software industry for almost 30 years, on and off, But at the same time, I've worked in education for about that long too.

Okay.

And so it's not surprising that a lot of my software development experience is on large educational software projects. Sure. Um, at the time, probably just before that talk at Yahoo and the article at InfoQ, I was a product owner on a very large Gates Foundation education project, a large enterprise student longitudinal data system. And so all of this came together for me very simply. I've been fascinated with Agile literally since the manifesto came public. I was interested in software management all the way back in the early '90s. And of course there was very little to guide us.

Sure.

Um, so my background is largely a person who came to technology in his 20s, but also one of someone who spent a majority of my career working in education in schools. I worked directly with schools and districts to support teachers in changing practice and schools and changing their approaches. And it seems to me that if you look at Agile as Scrum and Lean and XP and all the things that sort of come together, it's a perfect foundation, both philosophically and practically, for what we'd like to do in any learning situation. And I believe that's true because Agile is not really a software methodology. It came about that way. Because our projects got so large and complex that we couldn't learn enough about them fast enough to keep from making multi-million dollar mistakes. Yeah. And so fundamentally, Agile and its set of attendant methods is really fundamentally a learning methodology. It's all about handling complexity in large systems and moving with agility, which means learning faster than the system is changing, or at least learning as fast to adapt and be as agile as possible to changing circumstances. Well, this is the daily process that learners have to go through in all aspects of life, but especially children. And therefore, a teacher with 30 students, say, the elementary grades or 200 students at the secondary grades is perhaps challenged to be the greatest agilist in our society. That being said, there are extraordinary challenges to bringing that idea and those methods into systems in all countries, especially in the US where these things are very foreign.

No, absolutely. I love in your talk when you're talking about the different levels at which this could happen from a teacher's point of view. It could be at the classroom level, but then equally it could be at the grade level or at the school level or at the district level. And that's one of the big ironies is that this kind of approach with these agile students that we want is taking place within a system which is, let's say, not so agile.

Yes. My metaphor for it is, is that it is a shape that no matter how much you poke it and move it, it always comes back to its original form.

Exactly. It pings back. Yeah, for sure.

That's right.

That's right.

It's an anthropic quality. I think it's important that we acknowledge that an education system or a school must trail the culture. We are educating students based on the needs of their parents and communities, which, which come from a generation or two earlier. And we need to be responsive to that.

Yeah.

The other thing is within a system, if we think of a K-12 system as spanning a 13-year cohort, it takes an entire cohort to execute a change, and it usually takes a cohort before to prepare or create the change. At any moment, what is going on in a school or a system really is fundamentally 25 years behind where, say, an individual might be today.

Yeah. Interesting.

And so I like to keep us all with the perspective that bringing something like Agile into education will start first with individual classrooms like Julie Weyland's.

Yeah, exactly.

It will be individual people. Yeah, I will do certain things. There will be newer schools, particularly technology-focused charter schools, which will use more of these ideas. So while it perhaps has been easier to move ideas like Agile into technology companies and technology departments, the fundamental challenge exists. How do we take large-scale control, which is always necessary and always required, but bring it down to a level where the people who are actually doing the work have the most control over the work they do?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the transformative element, right? You know, there's a lot of human-centered approaches in all of the Agile philosophies that really align with those.

You're absolutely right. And you use the term human-centered, and what I think is ironic is that's a relatively new term, decade old perhaps.

Yeah.

And I would ask us all to say, when has work ever not been human-centered? So you can go back to the Industrial Revolution, all the way through. Human beings do the work. Human beings talk to other human beings about the work to be done. Largely, human beings do the work for, for the benefit of other humans.

Sure, you're right. But I think when the focus is on a kind of a human as a cog in a machine, right, as in a Taylorist kind of way, it's not, it's not actually human-centered in a values or a philosophical way. It's human-centered on a practical level, but but if they're only just a cog in a machine, then it's not centered around their needs or their values. And that's— that's a shift, I think.

Taylorism is a good touchpoint because what we saw in Taylor, and to some extent in all approaches, a diminishing of the value of the individual.

Yeah.

And more of the science and more of the management than what scientific management was supposed to produce, which is greater human productivity.

Sure.

So these two great forces of the individual and the organization, or as you put it, the machine.

Yeah.

Are again, these things have always been with us. And the question isn't so much who is right and who is wrong, but how do we navigate for the greater good?

Yeah.

For the good of all. The organization has to be successful. I think most organizations are successful to the extent that the people within them are successful. Yeah, so then the question becomes, what systems and philosophies do we put in place to make individuals most successful within a larger framework?

Absolutely.

I always try to put this idea out: I've never seen a solution that is either/or. Always and. And so I always want people to see that the optimistic view and the view of change and the view of best results always comes from and. It's not structure or freedom.

Yeah.

It's structure and freedom.

Interesting.

How much maximizing the freedom we can offer within a structure we have to have.

Of course. Yeah. And we do have to have it. Right. I really like that because there's, there's something pretty profound actually. About that in kind of reconciling opposites, reconciling the false dualities. But what's interesting to me now working in— so I do a lot of my work in international education, and there's a lot of talk around this idea of transformation as a powerful idea. And sometimes this is on an individual school level, sometimes it's on a countrywide or area-wide level, but there's so much parallel in the conversations around agile transformations that are happening all over the place. But I still think, and you know, we're talking about almost 10 years ago when you gave your talk at Yahoo, that even in that 10 years, it feels like there's been this conversation about Agile transformations happening over here, and then a lot of the same types of transformations that we want to see in schools or in education systems, but those two conversations have been largely ignorant of the other. Yes, and that's where I think there's something interesting happening now, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is was to see how we could bring those conversations more closely together to realize the potential that you clearly recognized.

Yes, and I was going to respond to that with 3 thoughts.

Yeah, go ahead.

The first is that within the Agile community, there is a thread of discussion that is not healthy, even within technology, and it's how agile are you? Well, we're more agile than you are, but I'm not sure that's the healthiest way to frame the argument. Right? We all need to recognize that we come to this in our own way, in our own time, and that any aspects of it that we bring are valuable.

Yeah.

So the first thing to recognize is the progress with anything is incremental. We want transformation, but transformation truly means changing the form of something. That doesn't happen overnight.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually, there have been at least two parts of schooling that I believe have always been rather agile. And I've been involved with both. And one is Maria Montessori's original work.

Yeah.

If you were to spend time in very good Montessori classrooms, we would go, this is suspiciously agile for something created in the early 20th century.

Yeah.

Second thing has been a larger movement in the United States for at least 40 or 50 years. It's the workshop style of teaching, which is used mostly in writing and other process-oriented situations. That is fundamentally agile because every single writer or student is pursuing something different. And the teacher works with almost 30 different teams, as it will, to give everyone the optimal experience of learning. The third thing and the newer thing in the United States, I don't think it's fundamentally a new thing, is project-based learning. And of course, this is small teams of students completing projects, which seems suspiciously suited to Scrum. When I watch Vili's work, I see what we in the United States would call, "Oh, that's project-based learning." Well, it's Scrum, but Scrum is simply the method of organizing students' projects, right?

Exactly.

It's just the framework that you're using.

That's right. So, well, you're right. Discussions tend not to occur across disciplines, but that doesn't mean that there aren't actual things that have happened. It is a question, I think, of being realistic and practical about how to move things forward piece by piece, recognizing that Agile itself did not come into the world full-blown, right?

Yeah.

It took at least a decade of horrific failure. I was working in— and in fact, 15 years. I was working in Boston, yeah, college, and in the late '80s, I watched DEC, Wang, and Prime Computer, these are the largest tech companies in the world. They all went bankrupt within a few years of each other.

Amazing.

All for the same reasons. That happened at Chrysler and all the large projects we know about that got us to Agile in the '90s. So if we think of Agile as a process that took 15 years simply to come to a point where 17 people could say what it was, and even then only a philosophy, and when did Scrum really begin to enter the workforce? Even when I was starting it in 2009, 2010, Scrum was pretty new on a practical level. Here we are in 2020. So we can, we can say that even within the workplace outside of school, Agile has yet to transform work.

Yeah.

And so I think we would imagine that it's a generational thing. Agile will simply transform things, but on a scale that is larger and slower —than perhaps you and I could recognize in our lifetime. No, absolutely.

And that's a nice way of framing it, an optimistic way of framing it, over the long term.

Just as one team within a software project can make an extraordinary amount of difference. What we've noticed about agile versus a traditional waterfall approach is that you may find a productivity difference of 5 or 10 times between an extremely effective agile team and even a very conscientious waterfall team. This does not mean that waterfall is bad or that waterfall is inappropriate. It simply means that certain types of projects lend themselves more to an agile approach, and other things we will always do in a waterfall method simply have to be done that way. Of course.

And back to your same point about it's not either/or, right? It's and.

It has to be and, and we have to avoid all these purity tests. I guess I would call them. Yes. Because if there's one thing that keeps the cross-disciplinary discussion from happening, it's the notion that one group has it and the other doesn't. Yeah. One group is, well, we're more agile than the people in that organization. That doesn't promote the discussion. No, it doesn't help.

But on one level, maybe we need the shining lights, the good examples to give us some inspiration. Absolutely, there's no question. So have you seen any in your work in schools, any particularly current examples of those types of shining lights that we can, we could use?

I see with almost all of my clients the use of things that we've had in education for quite some time. Something that was started about 25 years ago, professional learning communities. This does not sound very sexy, but when you think about it, it was taking the work of the entire district and allowing groups of 3 and 4 people to direct to some extent their own work. That's 35 years ago that we started that. Now, there's not very much that's agile about it fundamentally, but if you look at the original approach to professional learning communities, you'll go, oh my gosh, that's cross-functional, that's self-directed, individual teachers making decisions.

Sure, yeah, it's got some good elements to it for sure. It has exactly the same elements.

It had components of estimation. It had components of self-modifying teams and self-organization. It had components of evaluation, like we would do sprint retro. Well, sprint is built into professional learning communities simply by the cadence at which they meet, once a month usually. And then retrospective was built in simply by the fact that these teams began creating their own assessments, sharing them, teaching to them, and then meeting a month later to find out how things went. What would be the first thing we would talk about the second meeting is effectively the retrospective. Of course, yeah, yeah. We wouldn't use those terms. There's an elegance to the language of Agile that I think we should honor, and I think we should not underestimate the power of.

I know I've spoken to some people who find the jargon, one could say, to be a barrier to entry. For people. And so, you know, it becomes a reason not to enter the community and the ideas of Agile because they find the language a bit inaccessible.

I would say, and I'm not a linguist by any means, but I'm a real student of sociolinguistics, and the notion of what is jargon or jargonistic is a social construct, which means I construct my sense of whether you are speaking jargon to me, and it is fundamentally an antagonistic idea. I use jargon when I want to retain authority instead of helping you and sharing the ownership. Yeah. So jargon is not fundamentally a problem of language. It's a problem of intention in its use. Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. So if I'm speaking to a group of educators or a group of technologists and they react to me as saying, well, that's jargon, then The ownership falls to me to change the way I'm using the terms and explaining that because we have to have language to describe our change. The new change may be a new paradigm. Yeah. We know from Thomas Kuhn's original work in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the nature of a paradigm shift is such that if I hold paradigm A and you hold paradigm B, By definition, everything I say is understood through your paradigm. Of course. I can only speak through mine. So when we say transformation, I think we should acknowledge that what we're talking about is paradigm shift. Yeah. Now, if we look at it that way, Kuhn was very clear that the structure of scientific revolution occurs once every 100 years, because that is the human lifespan. That's how long it takes for everyone who holds paradigm A to not be active anymore, and you will find I often just look at US history, which I know quite well, and I'll go 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960. And whether you know much about the United States, you know exactly— that's a big moment— around those days. Those are fundamental paradigmatic shifts in United States culture, law, and language. Interesting. Much the same might be, might be said of Agile. If we're discussing the state of Agile transformation, in technology, I think we would assume that it would happen faster. Why? Because it started early. Yeah. If you're thinking about it coming to industry, like, for example, just as you pointed out, the human resources function, well, that's happening a bit now. It will take a little longer. Yeah. If we're going to go outside of corporate America into the public sector and the government sector, I think we can expect it to take the longest. Governments are built on large-scale societal change. Sure. Generational. Yeah.

Although I have to say some friends of mine who work in design and service design in the UK government, for sure, they've really picked up on the idea of agile delivery of policy design and service design. And they've, they've written it right into their approaches in terms of any tendering they're doing, any agencies they're working with. Are all needing to come in and use an Agile approach.

I'm glad you brought that up because I think you've hit on here what is fundamentally the most important thing, and we would understand it instantly if we said it this way: what leads to faster transformation anyway, but certainly the adoption of Agile, is always company organizational culture, right? It is always the culture as the soil, right? Agile is the seed. So what is the difference in how the UK might use something versus how the US might use something, how Finland or Denmark might use something? Yeah. Well, it's a matter of culture. And you would find in the United States within education and within many things, a larger resistance to cultural change. We're fighting through right now, as we are in many parts of the world, an extraordinary period of cultural tension. And in many regards, progress toward human-centered policy is taking a backward period now in the United States. I think there's some tendency toward that in Britain as well. Definitely, yeah. The fact though, that federal agencies in England are perhaps moving with more agility is absolutely a result of cultural change. Yeah. And this is where cultural transformation, I believe, is most effectively thought of as individual transformation at scale. I think sometimes we come in and we say, well, let's change the culture. Well, we might be first better served by saying, let's get those shining lights. Let's, let's help a few individuals change because that is the culture. You're right. No, no, absolutely. Culture change is fundamentally a social process. And I'm very fond, because again, this is very old work, the work of Dr. Everett Rogers in the diffusion of innovations. Okay. He's the one who coined terms like early adopter. Yeah. Well, his work starts in 1952 with the adoption of hybrid seed corn by Kansas farmers. Okay. Who would use the new seeds? How long would it take for this innovation to diffuse within a community? Well, his work is 70 years old. We know exactly how it works. We know the patterns of change. Yeah, we know the early adopters from the later group, from the groups who never adopt the change. In organizational development, it has to be considered the fundamental basis of everything we know about innovation working through a culture.

Yeah, interesting. And it's 70 years old. 70 years old.

And what was interesting is that Rogers redid his book every 10 years until his death. It's got to 6 and a half editions. And every year he repeated and made sure that his findings turned out to be virtually identical every decade. Amazing. More diverse, more industries. Some of his earliest studies were on diffusion of innovations in school districts. Wow. They were around more traditional things like adoptions of curriculum, but they followed the same patterns. A small number of people, perhaps 3 to 4%, always are interested in change. X group of people, the 10 to 15%, the early adopter. I'm very much a change-oriented person. I'm probably in the early adopter category. So I watch you do something and go, oh, I'll probably just get right on that. You might be the person who has to invent it.

Interesting. So given, given that this is going to be a long process is that we're optimistic and it's going to help to build the things we want to do for our young people, and especially with the speed of change that we know that we're preparing them for and all of that. So where do you see the big levers for continuing the change? I think that—

I'm going to say this and it's probably not what people want to hear, but the big levers are the smallest levers. So I look at Billy Ryans and I go, that's a big lever. Yeah, because once I know of his work, I send people to look at that. He sees more people. There is effectively a groundswell. It simply swells a little slower, but it does come from the ground. So the biggest agents of change, or the most power we will get for change, will always come from individuals whose work is first talked about and shared. I didn't have the answer for Agile education 10 years ago when I wrote an article for InfoQ and did talks at Yahoo, Google, and whatever. I was merely saying, hey, this is a natural fit. Yes. And to a certain extent, we've been doing some things like this before. Now we have a methodology that crosses disciplines and we're very interested in technology and we want kids to be more interested in it. So it seems a natural time. I think we would see more potential for change and transformation if we didn't think of it as transformation, but as formation. Right. Let me explain what I mean by that. You can take one of two approaches when you want to change a large school system. You can try to change the system as it exists. Yeah. Very long and challenging process that will feel always muted in some way. Or you can take very small parts of it and start them over from scratch. This is the idea of school starts versus restart. Yeah. So the most successful things that I've seen, whether they are agile or agile-istic, have always come at the school level. They've come in smaller schools and they've come from starting schools from scratch with a philosophy that is fundamentally agile to begin with. Yeah. And so if I had the budget purse and the strings and all of this, what I would do is similar to what you spoke of, of a government saying, well, we'd like organizations who provide services to us to provide them in a congruent way with a certain method. I would focus more on larger numbers of smaller self-contained efforts. Right. Yeah. And then I would resist the temptation because this is usually what we do. I would resist the temptation to scale those efforts up locally. I would scale them in a distributed way rather than taking a school of 90 and hoping that it could become a school of 900. Yeah. I would create 10 more schools of 90. Yeah, yeah, because what I'm going to get there are equivalent of 10 Scrum teams. Sure. And when I have 10 Scrum teams, 2 or 3 are going to do better than the others, and then the others can come along there. Yeah. And then rather than building into these large organizations, I think what we should do is find the right size. And I often go back to the anthropological finding of the rule of 150. Yeah. Many of our early settlements and societies peaked out at about 150 because that is about the limit of the number of human relationships a group can, can sustain. Yeah. Person basis. Yeah. I would love to see more 150-person school communities. Yeah. The notion of— I call them philosophically aligned schools. I don't mean that they exclude anyone. I merely mean that you know when you go there what the philosophy is.

Yeah. There's also with that size, there's a deeply human connectedness about that community, right?

Because there's fundamentally a human connectedness and we understand this very well from anthropology and psychology.

Exactly. And that's central to, to an Agile kind of philosophy of community, right? It comes back to that human-centered idea, and it's hard to do that with a community of 1,000 or—

Well, if we look in the United States and we say 60 to 70 million students, yeah, and, you know, Mr. Pihaw is over here saying he'd like to have schools of 150. One of the things that has happened in the modern charter school movement in the United States is a physical constraint. Yeah, I don't think anyone fears having more interesting schools, but each school requires a building, and we simply don't have enough buildings when the sizes of the schools are so small.

Yeah, it's true. But, but also maybe, maybe we're moving away from the idea of a school as a building.

That's right. If we move to a technology-focused approach where people are not in the same physical location, But without, without losing the human-centeredness. Well, there you go, right? Because we started with the notion of the group of the small group of people and that the cultural change we want is a culture of human-centeredness. Exactly. And connectedness. So again, it's the and, the idea of the and. In Scrum and in most companies that use Agile and Scrum, it's perfectly reasonable to do what we call WFH. Work from home. Now, you are more than welcome to work from home on this day or that day or this time at that time. Yeah. But when a person works from home and is not available for sprint retro or certain stand-up meetings or other group things, something is lost. Yeah. What's lost? The very fundamental basis of culture that makes Agile work. So again, I'm going to go back to the idea of 'and.' We absolutely— school does not have to occur in a building, but somehow on a regular basis we need to get people together in a room. Sure.

But also I think that's, that's why I like the Agile thing as well, is because there's almost a countercultural aspect to it in the sense that it's moving backwards to move forwards, you know, to remember that the human connection is how we build culture. That's how we build That's how we build, you know, just that's right.

That's right. In one sense. And again, sometimes this is so simple. We don't think about it. We're talking about human beings working together for the greater good of human beings. Anything we do that subverts or mutes the connection of human beings to other human beings takes us away from what we want.

Absolutely brilliant. That's an awesome way to finish. Thank you so much. I really— thank you so much. Been a really enlightening conversation for me, and I'm sure the listeners will really appreciate hearing these things from someone who is now, you know, almost a father of the Agile in Education movement, let's say. I can give you that compliment.

I appreciate that. It's very generous, and I will take that to my grave.

Please do. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

It's been a wonderful opportunity. I love talking about these things. Yes, great. I think this is what you, you mentioned, this is the dialogue that has to go on, and it always starts with two people.

You're right. You and me. And let's, let's broaden it out.

That's what makes it go. Go.

Thank you so much. Brilliant. Thanks, Steve. Cheers. Bye-bye.

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