[00:00:00] Heather Cowap: It was this idea that instead of doing the whole thing at once, we would plan and do it in iterations. They call these iterations sprints. They were typically a 10-working day, so two-week period of concentrated time. They can be shorter and they can be longer, where you’re just working on the three things that at the beginning of this you decided you were going to focus on.

[music]

[00:00:34] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe, and I am so excited to welcome Heather Cowap. We met last year at Harvard, and Heather said something to me in passing about using Scrum in the classroom. Many of you are sitting there today going, what is Scrum? She’s going to explain this to you.

I have to tell you, I knew exactly what she meant, and my first thought was, “No way.” Then we had a conversation, and that conversation has had me thinking about it since we had it back in November. I am delighted to welcome Heather here today. We’re going to talk about it. Now I’m going to let Heather introduce herself, and then we’ll get started. Heather?

[00:01:20] Heather: All right. Hi. Thanks, Gretchen, for inviting me to be here. It was a quick conversation, but I think we both knew we could have spent the next three days just talking about all the things that we were talking about with kids and learning and challenges, both in classrooms as teachers and educators, and then also for parents and families and communities as a whole because coaches are impacted by this conversation as well.

[00:01:50] Gretchen: When you told me what you were doing, I even saw applications on a pool deck as a high school swim coach, and I was like, “Wow, this would really be insightful for people to know about.”

[00:02:01] Heather: All right. I’ll start with a little background of who I am. I am a 20-years experienced biology teacher for 9th and 10th graders in Massachusetts. I taught in a upper-class suburban school district, so high expectations, high-performing district, so parents who were desperately devoted to having their kids hit the Ivies, whether or not that was the right place for the kids. There was a lot of pressure on kids to perform, on teachers, and on the school as a whole.

In a sense, that speaks to how I ended up doing this because I was meeting multiple goals at once. One of them being I had state standards that I had to teach because my students were taking a state test for high school. I couldn’t not do that while at the same time, I was really concerned about whether or not kids really were understanding why they were taking this class and the value of it, not just for them as 10th graders or 9th graders, but the value that it really was underscoring for the rest of their life.

Let me give you a tip on why I looked at biology from that viewpoint. [chuckles] My first college degree is in economics concentrating in international commerce. I took two non-science classes or non-major science classes to meet that credit. What I most remember from those classes were knitting some really great socks, writing a paper on leprosy, and getting an A.

For me, when I returned to school and studied dietetics, nutrition, I realized that I was not going to be able to do that. I was really relying on a biology class I had taken in 10th grade for a lot of the assumed knowledge I needed for those college credits and those master’s credits in the end because I did a bachelor’s and a master’s in nutrition, and then ended up in the classroom after some public health experience.

Also, I was a public health nutritionist. I spent a lot of time talking to people about why you wanted to eat. This way versus that way, and understanding the disease that they were dealing with, diabetes, what’s going on metabolically, obesity, all of those things. I was relying on them to have a connection to the biology class that may have been the last biology class they ever took in 10th grade.

I became very motivated to understand how to motivate deeper learning with my students. That was also kicked off by reading Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, which is really about what motivates us on every level. One of the big motivations, when you have no control over the what you are doing, having some voice and choice in how or when or where you’re doing those things can help trigger motivation. That then became my big question, like how do I give kids more voice and choice?

I found somebody named Kathie Nunley, who does something called Layered Curriculum, which allowed for choice, even though the when and where still remained the classroom. The when was still pretty much dictated by what was going on in the classroom. Then later was introduced to Universal Design for Learning, which is very much about how are we engaging kids in ways that they like to learn and find easy to learn and are more attracted to learning from.

That blend led me to having this wild classroom where what I realized was the kids were not keeping track of what they were doing. I would collect work. I would give them feedback. I followed a practice called Feedback First. There’s no score on the paper when it gets returned, only feedback. That comes out of a lot of research that says, “When you have something with a score on it, you look at the score, and then you put it away. You don’t even necessarily look any deeper to read the feedback.” Honestly, teachers spend hours on feedback. That was very disappointing. [laughs] Like, “Why am I doing this work for you and you’re not even putting anything down?”

[00:06:56] Gretchen: I might be that person, though. Until you said that, it never occurred to me that I might, “Oh, okay, that was satisfactory. Now let’s just move on.”

[00:07:04] Heather: Exactly. Rather than saying, “What did I lose points on?” They might leaf through it, but not necessarily actually take the time to read. This plays out with AI grading because you learn so much from reading kids’ answers about where that little piece of misunderstanding is twisted, and then you can really dig into that. That was another piece that I was really attracted to, was more that one-on-one being able to help kids with those little twists, rather than just that, “I’m going to stand up here and tell you a whole bunch of stuff. I’m not really going to engage with you on a more one-on-one basis in terms of understanding where you’ve got gaps in learning.”

I had this crazy class, and I read this book called Scrum, How to Do Twice as Much in Half the Time. A, that is a title that we can all really embrace.

[00:08:07] Gretchen: Yes, I have read the book, and I understand. It was the title that drew me to it.

[00:08:10] Heather: As a teacher, I would like it. Yes, please. In the book. Yes, I’m reading the book, and I’m like, “Oh, yes, okay, that makes sense. That would work.” Then at the very end, he actually references a program called EduScrum, which is run by a delightful, now retired Dutch chemistry teacher, Willy, and I always kill his last name, Wijnands, I think it is.

Willie had taken Scrum and completely rewritten his chemistry classroom. Here I am teaching science, and here I’m reading the guy talk about teaching science. You couldn’t say, “Yes, that works for English, but that’s not going to work in a science classroom.” I was like, “This is the missing piece.” Took my curriculum and I rewrote it to accommodate being able to make it, putting these practices to use.

I’m going to pause here and give everybody a quick overview of what am I talking about. If you don’t know what Scrum is, here’s your explanation. Scrum is taken from the term in rugby. Yes, if it sounded familiar, it is from that term. In rugby, a Scrum is basically a whole bunch of people piled together fighting for the ball. That is not Scrum in the classroom. There’s no fighting over a ball. It was picked up by a group called Agile, who created a management approach called Agile. It was specifically a software development management approach. What they had recognized is that the people who are doing the work are the ones who should be basically managing the work rather than a manager telling them when to do things, especially in software, where you can be halfway through developing a product, and somebody comes out with that button in just that right location, and then everyone’s like, “We’ve got to have that button in that location,” and that may throw off a whole project.

It was this idea that instead of doing the whole thing at once, we would plan and do it in iterations. They call these iteration sprints, and they were basically typically a 10 working days, so two-week period of concentrated time. They can be shorter and they can be longer, where you’re just working on the three things that at the beginning of this you decided you were going to focus on.

In that process, there are some practices. The first one is you have a backlog, which is basically what are you choosing from to work on in this sprint? You have a team meeting, so that can be everyone you’re working with. In my classroom, kids sat at tables of four, so that was your Scrum team. You had three other kids that you’re working with because we know that peer-to-peer learning is one of our strongest ways of building learning and understanding.

[00:11:14] Gretchen: Did you determine who those four people were, or did they self-select?

[00:11:18] Heather: I did a blend. I often let kids choose for the first unit who they were going to work with, and then we would adjust as needed because some kids chose wisely and some kids not.

[00:11:34] Gretchen: This is something we often see in co-op environments is when you put them together where you think that everybody will have strengths, and that doesn’t necessarily work that way. I’m impressed that you were willing to readjust after a period of time.

[00:11:51] Heather: It would be the first unit, so it was two weeks into a semester. I was teaching on a semester base, so I had a full year of content covered in one semester, but I had kids for 83 minutes a day, so we had [crosstalk]–

[00:12:06] Gretchen: Wow, that’s a long time.

[00:12:08] Heather: It is a long time, which for a science classroom is fantastic because labs can run whenever you want them to run. You can really embed them into the content appropriately rather than going, “We’re going to do this lab about this concept in three weeks because that’s when we have a lab day.”

With your teams, you’ve given them this backlog. In my case, I had a unit worksheet that took all of the learning goals of the unit and turned them into questions that they had to be able to answer or skills that they had to be able to demonstrate. Now I’ve really taken the what and I’ve given it as much to them as I can but made it very clear that you will answer these questions. That’s the what, but here, you have choice about how you’re going to go about answering the questions. In UDL, you always want something to watch, something to read, and something to listen to. In biology, which is really a foreign language.

[laughter]

[00:13:16] Heather: I encourage kids to use all three because when you read mitochondria, you may not hear mitochondria, but if you’re reading an auditory version of what you’re reading, like I had my textbook, but then I had an audio version of the textbook, I think that that’s one of the learning gaps that I ran into in my class was I might talk about something, but if they didn’t associate it with the written word, like chloroplasts or chromatids, then they could get confused when they weren’t actually confused. They just hadn’t associated what they read with what they heard.

Then there are a lot of things that you’ve got to watch a video or they just don’t make sense because, honestly, biology today is digging into a lot of biochemistry and metabolic processes, and they can be confusing when you are teaching kids who haven’t had chemistry yet. There’s only so much you can simplify. I had those options, and then everybody would do the lab, but within the labs, I usually had one section that had a choice.

For example, if we were studying cellular respiration, everybody had the same control, yeast in water with nothing. One of the tests was yeast in water with sugar, and then maybe give you a choice of a different type of sweetener, artificial sweetener, honey versus agave syrup that you could then have choice about to compare to what you saw with the rest. Biology, I think, lends itself to that because there is that inquiry focus.

The kids would have the first day of the unit, I would do a brief introduction to what we were studying, and then they would have about 20 minutes to, as a group, read through what the options were, decide what they wanted to do and in what order. You could do the lab first, or you could do the background reading first, or you could watch the video and then do whatever you wanted. Then there was usually a case study that was an example of real-life application of the concepts. We would have roughly 10 days to do this work, and the kids would map it out, and then they would build their Scrum board.

The first piece of this is there are three phases to Scrum planning. Decide what you’re going to do, decide what done looks like, so that’s like quality of work, have a conversation about how long you think each thing that you’re going to do is going to take, and then track it, both tracking how long it takes, so time, and also task, and those are two graphs. The Scrum board is a board that just has to-do, doing, and done. The time tracking is something called the burndown chart, so you start at the top. For day one, you’ve got everything to do, and then as you work your way down, it just helps you visually track.

[00:16:32] Gretchen: I didn’t know that my to-do list was a burndown chart, but yes, that makes sense. Think about it. As you cross things off, there’s less left to do.

[00:16:40] Heather: It’s over time. You’ve got your two weeks of your sprint. You’re down on day five. You can say, “We’re doing okay because we’re about halfway through everything where we should be,” or, “We might have homework this weekend because we’re behind, and I didn’t assign homework.” It was their job. If they needed to do homework, they did homework because I had them for 83. That’s not a 45-minute class where you then say, “Go home and–”

[00:17:09] Gretchen: One of the things I think that’s really attractive about your approach is they own it. You’re asking 14-year-olds to own it, which is really fascinating.

[00:17:22] Heather: Then, also, by having these visual tracking methods, I can hold them accountable, and they can hold each other accountable in the group because I can just walk over and take a look and see where they’re at, and I know where we are in the unit. I can say, “Hey, on Friday, maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time talking about the football game that night.” We can have those conversations too. [laughs]

[00:17:47] Gretchen: No, we would never do that as adults.

[00:17:51] Heather: No. No, we never waste time around the water cooler, but also saying you can choose to have that conversation on Friday, but then you’ve got to make up that work. It’s also giving kids that agency and accountability for themselves. Then, at the very end, you do something called a retrospective. That’s just basically talking like, “How did we do? How did we communicate with each other? How did we do on getting the work done? Did we over or underestimate how long things would take, given how we defined what is done?” It structures communication. It provides visual tracking, and that all allows for accountability.

The final piece is every day of the sprint, you have something called a standup, and it’s three questions. “What have you finished? Update the boards, what are you doing today? Update the boards, and where are you running into problems or impediments?” As I explain to kids, an impediment could be you’re waiting for information from somebody. Maybe you sent an email for some information. You’re waiting for feedback on that paper you turned in to the teacher, so you’re waiting on the teacher. It’s holding me accountable as well. It becomes more of a shared collaborative rather than teacher-driven or entirely teacher-controlled scenario because they could say, “We’re waiting on you.” “Okay, let me get on that.”

The other benefit is you’re giving kids a space that says, “I’m asking you this every day because I expect that you’re going to be running into problems. I’m not telling you it’s right or wrong,. I’m just saying we’re asking this because we expect that there will be times when you’re confused, you’re waiting to get to the lab, or whatever else. Somebody’s absent that day. There are a lot of reasons why we can have blockages to moving forward with our work. That’s Scrum in a nutshell. Also in a education context, because obviously you’re not talking about how are you going to learn this concept if you’re doing this in a software team.

[00:20:21] Gretchen: Right. I think one of the things that is absolutely fascinating here is you have taken a subject which can be constrained and dry and a lot of information flow. Instead of saying, “Here, I’m just going to impart information to you,” you’re saying, “Here’s the information I need you to learn. How are you going to learn it?” That is a wild flip of the concept even for kids to be able to understand, “Wait, you’re going to let me be in charge of figuring out how to get this done?”

[00:20:56] Heather: Yes. Let’s be clear, I curated the options. I’m making sure that what they’re referencing and resourcing is correct. It’s not like, “Go Google search answers to these questions.” I will say I had some that did that and it was very clear they needed more foundational knowledge before they chose that answer.

[00:21:29] Gretchen: Maybe they needed just a little bit of information on the first returned answer is not necessarily the correct one. [laughs]

[00:21:37] Heather: They learned that. They learned that from experience because I would look at the answer and be like, “Mm, no. I know where you got this from because I’ve checked that. Let’s talk about where the errors are.” As part of the setup of the thing, I would often say, “Do we think that we want a quick lecture tomorrow, in a few days? Do we think we need one at all?”

Depending upon the concept, you really don’t. What you really need is somebody who then logs roughly 5,000 steps a day in their classroom, going from table to table and group to group and kid to kid and having those one-on-one. “This is where I’m confused. Let’s get that clarified,” rather than having it be, “I have to sit through a 20-minute presentation to get to the answer that I need. By then, I’m so bored because the rest of it made sense. I just had that one thing I needed to know.”

[00:22:38] Gretchen: I’m seeing this as an entire change of a classroom dynamic. You didn’t have kids who were sitting there doing this and fiddling around because everybody is driving their own agenda. That’s really fascinating to me.

[00:22:53] Heather: The kids really enjoyed having that opportunity to both make those decisions and then to work with each other because they want to talk to each other. I had one classroom one year. Early on, I hadn’t done Scrum yet, but I was doing the layered curriculum, so on my journey to really letting go of the classroom. It is a journey because it’s a big mindset shift. It’s a way from saying, “I have to be in charge and in control or they’re not going to get this done,” to saying, “I can trust that I’m giving them opportunities and why’s for why this information is useful for them, and I can trust that they are going to be able to do a lot more independently of me.”

I had one year with the layered curriculum where I had exactly six kids on Individual Education Plans, so IEPs, and it was a blended classroom. I was able to put each of those kids at a separate table because the aide that I had in the room with me was willing to do this. We found that those six kids learned exponentially more. Also, had so much more confidence in what they were capable of because sometimes they did get the answer.

They’re sitting with a group of kids that they viewed as being so much smarter than them, and yet they had the answer. Also, they learned from them. Those, “smarter kids” had the joy of really deepening their learning by helping teach somebody else. It was a win-win. It only works with that kind of ratio, unfortunately, because unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of talking about kids, about their IEPs, is that many of them then embody that this somehow labels me as not being as good, rather than, “I have a learning challenge. How do I overcome this learning challenge? What are the skills and tricks and tips that I need to be able to do this because I can, which I want to show in that classroom?”

I had a case study that was technically a first-year college case study, they would have one kid at the table who’s like, “I really want to do this one,” and they did it too. They got it because they were reading it with other kids and discussing and clarifying. It was really great.

[00:25:36] Gretchen: One of the things that you were able to do there is leave kids in the lap of potential as opposed to the lap of lack. “I can’t do this because,” you just leveled the playing field for them in a very attractive way. I bet kids loved your class.

[00:25:58] Heather: I hope so.

[laughter]

[00:26:02] Heather: I often taught kids who were taking biology because they had to. It was a test. It was one of our state exams, required state exams. Coming from that viewpoint of, “I want this to connect to stories in a way that in 10 years, if, God forbid, you’re dealing with a family member who’s been diagnosed with cancer, you remember some of the biology that you learned that attributes to this.”

My finale years, I adapted the curriculum using the Tufts Great Diseases curriculum, which is from the viewpoint of you learn about certain metabolic processes from the viewpoint of cancer. You start with the disease state, and then you go from there, which meant that, interestingly enough, as we were rolling into the COVID shutdowns of the pandemic, because we were studying infectious disease, we had already calculated mortality rates.

We had already compared the SARS to the SARS to infection rates and why this was such a different situation. We’d already talked about the immune system’s role and vaccines and the whole thing. It’s really so inspiring when you can really give kids this really good sense of, “This is why this learning matters because you may never take another biology class. This may be it.”

[00:27:46] Gretchen: I also love the fact that you connected it to real-world experience because every parent or educator at one point in time has said or another, “When am I going to need this stuff?” You illustrated that in real-time why it was important to them. I bet that was a fascinating year.

[00:28:06] Heather: It was. That was the second-semester group. The first-semester group in 2019, we had a measles epidemic that was significant enough in New York City that schools were closed.

[00:28:19] Gretchen: Right. I remember that, yes.

[00:28:21] Heather: Right. We were talking about that in the fall. It’s a little frightening how always you can find something that you can use that’s going on in the real world that has direct impact.

[00:28:36] Gretchen: Tell me about your journey, attitudinally, because you’re a traditional educator who had a lot of experience before she came to the classroom, but you were steeped in the impart knowledge to my students model. Tell me what it was like to be able to loose those reins.

[00:28:58] Heather: It was lonely.

[00:29:01] Gretchen: Really?

[00:29:01] Heather: Right.

[00:29:02] Gretchen: That’s not a word I expected you to say.

[00:29:05] Heather: When you’re in a department and there are other people teaching your subject matter and you’re doing approaches that are not the same-

[00:29:14] Gretchen: I see that now.

[00:29:14] Heather: -you can feel– You have to be willing to forge your own way. I literally had other teachers saying, “How do you know that kids will be able to do this? I don’t think my students would be capable of doing this.” I’m like, “Well.”

[00:29:36] Gretchen: Sometimes we need to try. [chuckles]

[00:29:38] Heather: Yes, exactly. I’ve talked a lot or thought a lot about a couple of things that have shifted for all of us. I know that kids are not the same now that they were in the classroom before the pandemic, but quite honestly, a lot of what we saw and see now was on its way. It’s just the pandemic really accelerated a lot of it, or maybe made it apparent because it was no longer a day-to-day, this year’s class is a little bit different than last year’s class. It was a bigger, significant difference when we came back into the classroom.

[00:30:16] Gretchen: Quite a paradigm shift.

[00:30:17] Heather: Yes, a big one. I think part of the shift for me was thinking about my learning experiences. As I’m teaching this grade level, I’m also raising kids going through these grade levels myself. I had this ability, this opportunity to straddle the teacher and parent experience. I experienced them in different school districts, which I think is important when we think about this because if you’re a teacher in a school district that your kids are in, you already know so much more about what’s going on behind the scenes in that school district.

You don’t bother showing up for the parent meeting to orient your kids to the school because you’re there all every day anyways. You don’t need to necessarily know what parents who are new to the building maybe need to know. Whereas with my kids, I was going to those meetings.

[00:31:18] Gretchen: Sure, because they weren’t in your district.

[00:31:21] Heather: Exactly. I think what it made me realize were a few things. One, we’ve really lowered expectations of what we think kids can do at certain age groups. I walked myself to and from school in kindergarten.

[00:31:38] Gretchen: Yes, me too. Sure. We don’t let kids do that now.

[00:31:43] Heather: No, no. When I was in third grade, our neighbors had a kindergartner, and I was in charge of walking with her. Even there, as an eight-year-old, I was responsible for getting a five-year-old to school, and we walked home for lunch.

[00:32:05] Gretchen: Sure, yes, I did too.

[00:32:06] Heather: This was all twice a day. My mother was a professional volunteer. She was also an educator. Her background was elementary education. Because we grew up in New York, with the New York Botanical Garden and their early education programs and things, we had occasional days when we walked home for lunch when she wasn’t there. This was not probably until I was in fourth grade and my brother was in second grade. It wasn’t like kindergartners were coming home and nobody was home.

We would come home, lunch would be in the fridge, but we had to keep track of time to make sure that we walked back to school on time, which was a challenge for me because I’ve been a voracious reader all of my life, and I could easily lose track of time.

[00:33:02] Gretchen: I can absolutely relate to that. My kids, when they were growing up, were like, “Oh, no, mom’s got a knobble. We’re in trouble. We’re not going to get fed.”

[00:33:13] Heather: “What are we making for dinner tonight? Clearly, mom is not cooking tonight.” Right?

[00:33:18] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:33:19] Heather: Exactly. A lot of that’s been taken out of our children.

[00:33:24] Gretchen: We’re managing these kids every waking moment. They don’t learn how to manage for themselves.

[00:33:30] Heather: Nir Eyal’s book, Indistractable, actually talks also about one of the outcomes that he reflects on of having kids’ lives be so managed by adults. We don’t have sandlot baseball anymore. You’re playing on a little league team. There’s an adult who’s telling you what you’re doing today. This could be one of the attractions that kids have for video. It’s the one place where parents are not engaged in what they’re doing. They’re free to experience and to play and to interact without an adult telling them what to do.

[00:34:13] Gretchen: I had the privilege of interviewing Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free-Range Kids last year. She writes some powerful information there. She brings the receipts as far as what do we know about how much danger our kids are in versus what we perceive as how much danger our kids are in. We really need to give kids, as you have done, the autonomy to drive the car, so to speak, as far as figure out what their learning capacities are and to be self-motivated for achievement.

[00:34:49] Heather: Also, because in doing those things, they develop things like time awareness and task tracking and task awareness. I’ve had conversations with professors. I can remember talking to one professor of sociology. He was tearing his hair out because he had a postdoc student who was a brilliant statistician, but it was absolutely unable to correctly predict how long it would take them to get anything done. It was driving him crazy because he needed the stats to be able to finish the analysis, to be able to write the journal article. I looked at him and I said, “We don’t teach that.”

[00:35:40] Gretchen: No, we just assume you’re going to figure this out.

[00:35:43] Heather: We assume, and yet at the same time, we do things like say, “Here, this worksheet is due at the end of class. How long will this worksheet take you to do?” “A class time because that’s what the teacher told me. I have this whole class to do this worksheet. By the way, now I’m distracted because I’m looking at the worksheet and I’m like, ‘This is easy.” I’m going to talk to my seatmate rather than get the work done,” and then, “Oh, shoot. We just got the five-minute warning because we’re going to our next class in five minutes and I haven’t finished it.”

That was one of the most amazing things was listening to the kids play this game Scrum poker, which is basically, it’s predicting how long do I think this assignment’s going to take, and having them have those conversations like, “Oh, no, this looks really easy.” Yes, but it’s really interesting when you have a student who’s like a three words should be enough of an answer having this conversation with the three-paragraph answer kit. Whoa, that’s a good one. It’s good for both of them. One, because the three-word kit is like, “Maybe I should write a sentence,” and the three-paragraph kit is like, “Maybe I don’t need to answer it that thoroughly.”

[00:37:00] Gretchen: In these 10-day sprints, I’m imagining that the first time you put up a sprint, it was a little all over the place and then they learned the process.

[00:37:12] Heather: Yes. The first time I do a sprint, I did it more as a full class. We would walk through each step. Now, they still had these table conversations. They still made their selection with their table group, but we would say, “For the next 20 minutes, everybody take a look at the assignment. Discuss what you want to do.” I always had three case studies to choose from. I tried to make, again, as much choice as I could in there.

If there was a poster option like, “Make a poster showing blah,” it was also, “Draw a cartoon, choreograph a dance.” I tried to give them a bunch of ideas of how they could do that so, again, they could make a choice. Then, “Now that you’ve made those choices, what’s the first one that you’re going to do? Now, let’s have a conversation about how to play Scrum poker.” We would play around a Scrum poker where everybody was–

[00:38:10] Gretchen: Tell me more about that because this sounds interesting. You’ve gamified the adventure.

[00:38:15] Heather: Scrum itself has Scrum poker. This is part of the process of Scrum. They use [crosstalk]–

[00:38:23] Gretchen: Maybe that is what was missing when we did it on my teams because we never got to play poker.

[00:38:28] Heather: No, no. It actually is interesting. The very first time I ran through doing this with my class, I didn’t include the Scrum poker because I was a little confused about it. The first time I ran it with Scrum poker, it was significantly better.

[00:38:45] Gretchen: Really? Okay.

[00:38:45] Heather: It was really interesting what a difference it made to actually specifically talk about time and tasks together. In actual Scrum, they use a Fibonacci sequence of cards or time estimation. There is an alternative one called the T-shirt choice, which I adapted to be different size beakers. What you say is we have an extra small, a small, a medium, a large, an extra-large. These are your choices of sizes. You can agree that medium is one class period. You define what the middle one is. You have everybody hide their cards.

Everybody has a set of these five cards. They hide their cards and they decide, “How long do I think this worksheet is going to take.” “I think it’s a small. It’s going to take me less than a class period to do it in.” I’m not giving a specific time. I’m just giving an estimate of what I think it’s going to take. Then somebody else comes back and says, “I think this is an extra-large because three paragraphs per answer.” Then you go, “Count three, two, one, everybody’s card goes down.” If everybody’s about the same, you’re good. You’re like, “Okay, so we all think this is going to take one class period. Boom, that’s what we’re going to allocate for it.” If you have a big disparity, now you have a conversation. “Why do you think it’s small when I think it’s an extra-large?” Then you really start talking about things like, “What is my definition of done for this particular worksheet versus yours? How much effort do I think it’s going to take to get to that?” In the terms of executive function skills, that’s really the meat and gravy of using Scrum.

[00:40:39] Gretchen: Did you find that their estimates became better honed over time?

[00:40:44] Heather: Yes. For many of those kids, it’s the first time anybody had asked them the question, “How long do you think this work is going to take?”

[00:40:52] Gretchen: Exactly. How do you learn to figure that out if no one asks you the question, which is translatable from a classroom to a parent and child across the table at home? Same thing. If you don’t know how to estimate time, where do you learn that?

[00:41:10] Heather: Right, exactly. This is something where I think we run into the challenges of assumed knowledge and then implicit and explicit instruction.

[00:41:21] Gretchen: Can you talk a little bit more about that, implicit versus explicit? Because this is really important. I understand what you mean.

[00:41:29] Heather: Yes. This is really the heart of why it’s worth figuring out how to do this in your classroom or in your home because this is it. Assumed knowledge is, “I learned how to do this so long ago, I don’t remember learning how to do this. This is simply something I know, and therefore, I assume everybody else knows it.” Implicit instruction is when I think that by showing or by telling them how long something will take or by repeating a direction. This could be, “I’m assigning a project and I’m telling you that in three days your topic is due with an outline because you’ve done your preliminary research.”

I’m telling you three days that somehow implicitly I’m instructing you in how I came to that decision. There’s a lot of this blend and mashup of assumed and implicit that happens in classrooms. “This worksheet will take one class period.” Why am I saying that? I’m basing it on up to 10 million kids who come through my classroom and that’s pretty much how long it took them, but that’s an average. That’s not you.

Explicit instruction is saying, “How long do you think this will take.” It’s also using a term metacognition where you talk about what you’re thinking as a part of coming to that decision. In a home, that might be, “You have swim lessons today at four o’clock. It takes us 20 minutes to drive to the pool. You need to be dressed and ready to leave by 3:30 because I know it’s also going to take a few minutes for us to find the last of whatever gear we need to bring with us before we get in the car to drive to the pool so that you’re at your swim lesson on time.” That’s explicit. That’s metacognition of what I’m thinking.

It lets the kid then say, “Okay, I understand I have to account for it’s 20 minutes to get to the pool. Mom or dad or whoever’s driving me is giving me 10 minutes to last-minute pull things together, but really, I know it’s going to take me this long to transition from whatever I’m doing to getting into my bathing suit and whatever I’m wearing over that to get into the car.” That’s explicit instruction. Making it very open. We talk about this in schools as scaffolding.

When I’m teaching a skill, which time awareness is really a skill? Calling it time management is really an oxymoron because time is time. It’s really self-management in context of time that we’re talking about. That’s also something that we often forget when we’re trying to have these conversations. Now, I’m putting it into a context where we’re making this conversation open. I can make this a checklist where you fill in the times that it’s going to take you to get somewhere. That’s one form of scaffolding. I can make that checklist any kind of thing I want it to be.

Then, also, I can start plugging in tools. I can plug in a time timer or an hourglass turner or setting an alarm on your phone or your alarm clock or whatever or a timer so that you’re having something that’s helping you remember to keep track of time. That’s a skill. It’s not the same as a concept. That, I think, is where we really run into the problems with instruction because just talking about it does not teach you a skill. I would not show a kid a video of dribbling a basketball and say, “Now you can dribble a basketball.” I would say, “Now we need to practice. Now you’ve seen me do this.”

I like to talk about executive function skills and staircases. On the first step, it’s done for you. Then on the second step, you start doing it with each other. Then by the third step, the adult should be stepping back, serving as a reminder or poke, but leaving more and more of the actual decisions to the kid because that’s how you learn a skill.

[00:46:26] Gretchen: Absolutely. Tell me, how did the conversation go when the time estimate was faulty the first time? How did you lead kids through you didn’t manage your time?

[00:46:42] Heather: Well, I just let them experience it because you have that time burndown chart where you’re tracking how much work you have to do and how much time you have left in the unit to do. If you were still sitting up there around like, “We have still four assignments to go. We only have four days left.” Like, “No.” Because many of these, you do a lab, you’re doing the work one day, then the next day, you’re doing your analysis. Some labs are more than one or two days. You may say, “Yes, I only described a handful of assignments for this two-week period.” “That’s easy for kids to get.” “No, no, because these things don’t all get done in a day.”

[00:47:28] Gretchen: Was that a deliberate choice on your part to make sure that there were things that had to be the extra-large T-shirt size?

[00:47:36] Heather: It’s just the nature of teaching science. Labs don’t take a day. It’s data collection on day one. It’s analysis on day two. It’s lab report on day three. Labs just never take a day. Doing a case study really well takes more than a day because you’re going to read through it, and then you’ve got to think about what the questions are asking, and then finding the evidence for your answers. It’s something that takes, especially in that age group where these are also skills that they’re still learning to really have evidence-based answers, to be able to reference back to the correct data.

In labs, possibly having to run something again because you made a mistake the first time. Yes, implicit in a biology curriculum is things take more than a class.

[00:48:35] Gretchen: I have a daughter who is a research biologist today. She would say that this is probably the most valuable skill you imparted to them is to recognize that things aren’t always going to go according to plan. What do you do when things get yanked sideways? How do you adjust and regroup? That’s a valuable life skill as well.

[00:49:00] Heather: Fridays were often an important day to have that conversation of, “Let’s take a look at that.” Stand-up became more important because it became not just, “What have you done? What are you doing? Where are we stuck?” It became, “In terms of where are we stuck, let’s do a touch and take a look at how much time do we have left? How much work do we still have to do? Okay, so everybody, we’re agreed that we’re all going to finish this. When we come in Monday, we’ve dropped two assignments or two of our selected workpieces so that we know that we have time in the next week to be able to do things.”

[00:49:41] Gretchen: Now, you said that you’ve also developed an email course for families to be able to figure this out.

[00:49:47] Heather: Yes. I think the two big things that I’ve realized about these conversations are that, one, we underestimate the impact of not learning these skills and not talking about these skills, and then they become incredibly important. We were talking about this earlier, can really raise the temperature in the household because your kid is coming home and they’re not allocating enough time to study for the quiz. Now the quiz grade is terrible, but even though it’s just a check-in, it feels like so much more because it’s a quiz. It’s a lot of weight and it leads to sometimes unhelpful conversations.

The email course is a lot about how do we bring that temperature down? How do we talk about these things? I focus on tweens, so middle school in particular, because by the time kids hit high school, the GPA starts to matter because that’s the grade list that gets sent off to college for applications. Middle school is you’re still in that safe zone of you’re getting grades, you’re starting to learn how to deal with more than one teacher and more than one teacher’s system, so it becomes more important that you have your own system, but the grades aren’t quite so be all, do all.

[00:51:24] Gretchen: They don’t have the same impact as they will in a couple of years. You know what’s really interesting, Heather, is I talk to parents all the time about, “Are you surrendering responsibility for deadlines to your child, to your 10, 11-year-old?” Parents will look at me like, “I would never do that. They’re too young.”

[00:51:48] Heather: My favorite conversation when I started doing Scrum in my classroom was with a parent who came in to tell me that her 15-year-old was too young to be able to do this. I was thinking to myself, “In three years, they’re going to be old enough to do this in college?” Because if they’re not doing it now, when we can support them and help them and have these conversations, have these retrospectives on how did that quiz go? Do you think you allocated–

[00:52:18] Gretchen: [crosstalk] How’s that working out for you?

[00:52:21] Heather: Did you allocate enough time to study? Did you turn off the phone or whatever it was that was distracting you so that you weren’t able to focus with enough time to be prepared? Those conversations, you’re not having them with your 18-year-old who’s not living in your house because they’re on a college campus where they are having classes that meet twice a week, three times a week, a lot more free time that they have to self-manage?

[00:52:54] Gretchen: See, I really think that if parents would apply the ideals that you’re setting forth here, we wouldn’t have the articles like the article that came out in The Atlantic three weeks ago about why new college graduates are being fired right and left because they can’t manage their time, they don’t understand expectation, and they don’t know how to meet expectation. I’m excited to be able to see parents take what you have practiced and perfected in the classroom and be able to do that with their children. I think it makes a huge difference.

[00:53:29] Heather: Huge difference because one of the other things that motivated me doing this was when I looked at my students in a college prep biology class versus my honors biology students, it wasn’t intelligence and it wasn’t the ability to understand these concepts. What was the difference between those two classes was this gap of being able to self-manage their time, keeping track of their tasks, of being able to do this executive function work.

That was why I became so frustrated because I’m like, “This is your work. You need to be accountable for your work. I’m chasing after 150 papers. This is ridiculous.” How do I structure my classroom in a way that hands that responsibility, keeps you accountable so we don’t end up going, “I handed this off, but you don’t have the skills or the ability yet, that very crucial growth mindset term, yet to do this. How do I help you bridge yet?” That was really what I found Scrum allowed me to do because it was so structured that if you follow the structure, that whole bridge of yet is there.

As an added bonus, I had lots of parents who were in software engineering who were very excited that their kids were learning what they were doing at work.

[00:54:58] Gretchen: Very cool.

[00:54:59] Heather: Right.

[00:54:59] Gretchen: Very cool.

[00:55:00] Heather: Because they were using Scrum in their offices, and they saw it as a future-ready skillset.

[00:55:08] Gretchen: Heather, I cannot believe we’re already at the top of the hour.

[00:55:12] Heather: Nobody knew this.

[00:55:12] Gretchen: Now, you have put all of this wonderful wisdom into a book that’s going to come out this year. Tell us the name of your book.

[00:55:21] Heather: It’s Skills for Student Success. It’s going to be a collaborative workbook for parents to do with their students, with your kids. It’s something–

[00:55:29] Gretchen: I can’t wait. I’m excited. I don’t have kids at home anymore.

[00:55:34] Heather: It’s a combination of the research and the science background for what’s going on in our kids’ brains in this age group, so middle schoolers. It’s a collection of techniques and approaches for each of the skills so that you find the one that works for you and your family, and especially for your kid. Some kids are good with a timer. The noise is not upsetting. Some kids are not. How do we have a visual? Options around things like that.

Then, also, sections that are for your child to read that are geared towards helping them develop their own growth mindset, understanding the yet, tying in why these skills are valuable to them, like have a good evening routine. You can sleep later in the morning. Do you know of any 13-year-old who would say no to that wind? I don’t. Great. That’s the structure of what the workbook will be. It will be walking through some of the most crucial, in my experience as a high school teacher, most crucial skills that kids need to come into to allow them to really flourish and to be successful. It’s not just for schools, for life.

[00:56:51] Gretchen: Absolutely. I want to thank our audience for joining us today, for listening to what Heather has had to say. I know that there is a lot of virtue in what she’s saying. I am wildly excited because what she is doing is creating an opportunity for you to figure out how to teach your child to self-manage, and that is enormous. The show notes to this particular episode will be profoundly important to you all. Heather, I want to say thank you for taking time to come and share with us today. Once everything is out on the market, I think you need to come back again so that we can talk about how it’s going because I’m really excited for what you’ve got coming.

[00:57:31] Heather: We may only have another three days to talk.

[laughter]

[00:57:35] Gretchen: Thank you to everyone who allows us into your home. Thank you for trusting us to share this information with you. We want to equip you for the journey forward, and I think you will find that to be so in this particular conversation. Take care, everybody.