The pre-school Scrum team

My wife works as a pre-school teacher and occasionally I am able to drop by and see her class. Watching how children learn and play is fascinating.

One day I observed the children work together on a task set by their teacher, they were making a collage using paint, paper cutouts, leaves, etc, etc. The children were very excited and eager to get started. The teacher had set up a table with all the materials and taken the time to tell them what they were going to do.

Not unexpectedly the children bickered about who was going to do which task, the teacher waited to see if they could sort the situation out by themselves using the life skills they are taught about sharing, respect and negotiation. This didn’t happen and the teacher needed to step in and ask them if they could think of a better way to share the tasks rather than fighting. The children remembered that they could share something with someone and negotiate with them: “Maybe Jack could paint the first part and then I could paint the second part?” suggested one of the children. The teacher agreed and let them continue; occasionally refereeing disagreements, suggesting better ways to do things and answering calls for help.

It struck me the teacher was acting as a Scrum Master in a Scrum team (and to a small extent the Product Owner)! She was helping the ‘team’ self organize, removing impediments when asked and helping out if needed. The ‘team’ were learning how to get their work done between them, figuring out the best process and techniques to produce the result they wanted, using previous experience with paint and glue  and most of all, since they were removing conflicts they were having fun and being more productive. There was no daily meeting or planning session but the ‘team’  did demo their completed product to their parents and did talk with the teacher at the end about what they had learned about sharing, negotiation, collaboration and about the materials they used, how they felt and what they looked like when they were done. A true retrospective!

Now this got me thinking: this is a very common way for pre-school children to learn (I did it this way nearly 40 years ago too). It seems natural for children to work and learn together to build the essential life skills they will need. So why is it, sometime later in their education this stops? Learning becomes strictly individual based, no collaboration, no learning from peers or figuring out ways to deal with different people and personalities. This continues in a lot of people’s careers too. Chances are, if you have a white collar job, you are sitting by yourself in a cube or office isolated from others that you work with day in and day out.

With increasing adoption of Agile techniques in software development and beyond we are trying to revert back to the state of teamwork. Scrum has proven to help teams become more productive, invested and happy in their jobs.  Many issues in adopting Scrum are based on individual’s resistance to transparency and close collaboration with their team overcoming years of working alone.

Are we missing out on something between pre-school and Agile adoption? With Agile becoming so ubiquitous in the software world (80% of software projects in 2012 are expected to use Agile methods) will its adoption eventually spread to the School system? Anything is possible!!