Since the beginning of the crisis we have at the school made use of our usual agile approach to structure the teaching.
The purpose with the initiative has been to
- help keeping up a daily rythm
- support that the teachers’ and parents’ efforts get structured, using issue tracking
- facilitate that that the teachers can follow up, inspire and coordinate with others – teachers, parents and pupils
After almost two weeks of functioning, this is the status:
In the morning each teacher meets with ~5 pupils on-line and follows up on the previous day’s tasks. The follow-up is done according to the three Scrum questions:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- Do you need any help?
The pupils can even act as Scrum masters!
The Scrum is kept short and concise and other questions are treated afterwards. This somewhat rigid base structure is well suited for on-line meetings.
The tasks are managed using an issue tracker. We use Trac because it can be configured to meet our needs.
The tasks come in two flavors:
- drills: core subjects (Danish, math, French, English) are covered using traditional exercise books. The pupils formulate their weekly objectives in terms of number of pages to complete. Correction and feedback is done by the parents.
- projects: project issues are formulated according to the FIMME model (Danish for: purpose, content, methods, materials and evaluation) and with a deadline. We encourage that the end product be a short movie, but it can also be a report, drawing, slideshow, a photo…
Examples of movie productions can be seen on the school’s youtube channel and all the pupils are encouraged to publish on the channel. For a start, baking activities have been particularly popular and so have stop motion movies.
The teachers also meet on-line on a daily basis to follow up on the various initiatives.
They have started daily on-line teaching sessions (“capsules”) in groups or one-on-one
And the parents organize on-line playdates.