Empiricism & Agile Teaching for the XXI century workers: A place where apply LEGO? Serious Play?

 “Teaching is a messy, indeterminate, inscrutable, often intimidating, and highly uncertain task. ” Richard Elmore

 In “The Origins of Poor Teaching”, Richard Elmore of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education writes that: 

College studenti are motivated more by a desire to master the subject matter and less by how the subject matter is presented.    “... We assume that students who attend college are motivated by an appreciation and respect for knowledge. While bells and whistles are needed to motivate students in primary and secondary schools, our students are only interested in the subject matter”.

 When we refer to Agile Management, we are referring to a culture of:

• iterative development
• responding to change
• collaboration and completing, releasing and iterating work as set out in the Agile Manifesto

When taking part in any training, it’s important to remember that there are many different approaches to applying this manifesto and its principles. These are only interpretations and there is no one way of doing it.

 At Group BEST Barcelona, we take as a one of our main basis Project Based Learning framework and methodology -PBL -. We take the tools that we need to from a range of techniques and use the most appropriate for the project and team to help support them to deliver. This means that not all teams will be working in exactly the same way. 

One of the methodological tools that help us with PBL to prepare Agile learning processes is LEGO? Serious Play?. It helps to develop skills and attitudes needed to innovate and improve the performance of people in teams and organizations to which they belong, proposing an accurated training process and a strategic transformacion deeply experiential.

 Small experiments and running short projects 

The best learning can come from doing, derived from experiences, in sum: Empiricism. Agile techniques and LEGO? Serious Play? can be applied to many types of projects and are not restricted to software. This means that you can quickly start to learn as a team through running small projects. Take a project that you’re working on and start to apply agile techniques to it, then improve on them as you go. You can learn a lot from being unsuccessful: the phrase “fail fast” is often used in an agile context, but what you can benefit from is learning quickly.

 At the end of an empiric learning process is mandatory questioning and retrospecting.

You’ll learn a lot through asking questions and there is an agile tool that helps you to do this – the retrospective. This is an important part of any agile team and a good way of learning – everyone has an input. Regular retrospectives are great way to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can think about how your learning can be directed. Once again, the role of LEGO? Serious Play? matchs perfectly in this important last phase.