It’s been a
busy three weeks in my BTT class. The teams have started their projects and are
running fast with them.
I love
watching kids struggle. No – not because I want them to suffer, but because
wrestling with an idea or task both deepens their learning and develops true
self-confidence – nothing like succeeding at something hard to make you believe
in yourself.
They
started with charters, and then plans. The parts of the plan they had the
hardest time with were the Assumptions and Risk sections. My fault, perhaps, since
I focused their project management training and practice on requirements and
task analysis. At 13 years old, they have some trouble making abstractions into
unfamiliar territory without being explicated taught how.
We got a
good lesson on Risks, though. Nobody identified the risk that we might lose our
wi-fi connections. Although we have a computer lab to use, it is quite ancient,
and many of the students bring laptops, pads, smart phones and so on, - and use
them like crazy. I guess we just take ubiquitous wi-fi for granted, because we
were thrown into a tizzy when the school’s wi-fi went down and stayed down. Apparently,
TDSB is putting too much load on our service provider. Anyway, we have all had
to adjust to making do with our painfully slow lab computers and WITHOUT
instant in-your-hand communication and file movement. If we want to tweet, we
have to sign on to a computer! I was tweeting 30 times a class from my ipad.
Now I have to interrupt and make announcements – it’s distracting for everyone.
It’s been very annoying, but also a very instructive event in terms of how
overlooking a risk can impact a project.
After
getting the planning done and approved, the teams have started sprinting. And they
are building good stuff. An internal student resources website is already
complete and in use. Likewise, the Project Office website is serving as a repository
for all our work. The documentary teams are making everyone’s lives interesting
with all their filming, and this week they started interviews and some editing.
There is a
lot of action!
The interpersonals
on the teams are also interesting. On one team, the scrum master and film
director are at each-other’s throats, but today they actually sat down (without
my prompting) and had a heart to heart and appeared to work out their
differences. We’ll see in the next couple days whether they genuinely managed
to come to an understanding.
One team
(the team that had already delivered the student resource website) is like a
well oiled machine – I’ve seen professional software development teams that
weren’t as organized and that didn’t communicate as well as this lot. I give
the leader a lot of credit – she is doing an amazing job - but I’m also
impressed to see how other members of the team have stepped up and taken
initiative.
This team
did have a bit of a bump today. The websites are quite accessible from inside
the class since there are groups of people working on them, in what we thought
was a trusted environment. Someone thought it would be funny to add some rude
commentary to the website, as well as an inappropriate video. The kids whose
work was defaced were really, really upset. I think they genuinely felt
violated that their honest work was treated with such disrespect by someone in
their own class. They had been so proud – not only of the good job they had
done, but because the site was being used daily for something real - by all the
grade nines to help them with their summative projects. We were able to fix it
quickly and easily, of course, but I think the kids were really hurt. My next
job is to track down who the perpetrators were. I have a pretty good idea who,
but if they lie when I ask them, I don’t have any proof.
My second
well-oiled machine is the Library site team. I put all the ESL kids on one
team. This was a slightly eccentric choice. The usual is to spread the ESL
students out to force them to speak as much English as possible. I decided in
technology class that I wanted them to put their energy into their projects,
rather than into language acquisition, and it’s been amazing to me how the students
have bloomed, and how fantastic their work has been. Without the language
barrier to invest their energy in, they have been free to be creative. They all
speak Mandarin, and there are two team members that speak Mandarin and English
fluently, so they are able to translate instructions and questions. They are
like different kids. Instead of being all quiet and reticent and not
participating, they are all chattering a mile a minute – exchanging ideas,
discussing solutions, laughing and getting excited about their work. The best
part is, they are completely organized (their project management artifacts are
all in English, and they are excellent!) and their site is looking fabulous –
they didn’t just cobble things together – they actually innovated and came up
with some amazing ideas. This would never have happened if they had been forced
to work in English.
I have also
noticed this week that the teams are beginning to exchange information and
resources. My experience has been that this step represents a new and better
phase for team working, but that it doesn’t always happen. But yesterday the PR
team overheard the documentary team moping about some film they weren’t be able
to get, and jumped in with an offer to provide the film – which they had been
able to shoot, but for a different purpose. Today, the two teams agree to pool
all their film and they set up a Google Docs space to make it available to everyone.
Within the
next two weeks, I should be seeing nearly done work from all the teams. I am
excited. But more important, so are they!
