ABLE Guide: Roles

This is a work in progress as I develop the The Self-Organizing Classroom - A Quickstart Guide to Agile Based Learning Environments. 

Please email or comment your feedback so I can make this as educator-friendly as possible. 

ABLE ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

ABLE provides 3 roles in the classroom; (1) the ABLE Teacher, (2) the ABLE Facilitator, and (3) the Learning Team. Each has distinct responsibilities that interlock and balance one another to enable self-organization. It is important to not only understand the roles and responsibility, but, most importantly the classroom's journey in actualizing the roles.When the roles are fully actualized, a self-organzing classroom emerges, full of engagement, collaboration, creativity, and focus.

ABLE Teacher

• Responsibilities:
• orders and adapts the classroom  backlog based on the current realities of the classroom
• develops and communicates clear learning outcomes and assessment criteria
• ensues the learning backlog is highly visible to the classroom and other classroom community members at all times.
• owns the "Empowerment Dial" and the "Empowerment Board"
• assesses the learning outcomes
• creates a learning environment that fosters creativity, empowerment, collaboration, and engagement
• establishes learning teams that leverages diversity of strengths and perspectives
• Characteristics:
• finds joy in being surprised of emergent and novel approaches when empowering students to develop their own way to achieving a learning outcome
• embraces a "growth mindset" for the classroom, each students, and herself
• belief that students will be responsible, if given opportunities to make their own decisions
• ability to articulate learning goals clearly
• ability to fast forward attitude
• situational leadership style
• The ABLE Teacher's Journey is from teacher to coach. From the "sage on the stage" to the trusting and empowering "guide on the side"

ABLE Facilitator

• Responsibilities:
• facilitates the ABLE Events, for her team or on a rotation for whole classroom learning
• helps the team stay focused, positive, and productive
• reinforces and reminds the team meet their ABLE Agreements
• encourages the team to utilize each member's strengths
• helps the team follow the ABLE framework.
• encourages the Learning Team to stretch reach their next Empowerment Level
• removes roadblocks from the team and escalates issues that can not be resolved by the Learning Team to the Teacher
• facilitates in team member mediation when needed
• helps the team identify and obtain resources to meet their goals
• does not have to be a dedicated assignment, it may be rotated to a different students per Sprint
• does not have any authority over the team
• The ABLE Facilitator may be the teacher in certain situations, such as:
• intervention situations
• early stages of ABLE to model the ABLE Facilitator role
• The ABLE Master's Journey is from "just reciting the ABLE Process" to a "Team Coach and Facilitator", that can ask powerful questions of the team to help move them to their highest potential

ABLE Team Member

• Responsibilities:
• the "how of the work"
• develops their own learning and project tasks
• "pulls" their own learning tasks
• collective ownership of the tasks as a team
• commit to doing their best to achieve the learning outcomes be the end of a Sprint
• Characteristics:
• self-organzing is the fundamental characteristic and ultimate goal of an ABLE team
• extremely collaborative
• shared ownership of goals
• self-mediating
• team has diverse strengths, aptitudes,styles and passions that complement each other.
• no prescribed roles exist or are assigned, except for the ABLE Master. Each team member contributes their own unique strengths and talents to accomplishing their shared goals.
• suggested group size is 3-5 students. Too large of a team makes self-organization difficult; too small of a team does not provide the diversity required to leverage one another's strengths.
• Self-organization means that the team is not told "how" to do their work and there is no central authority directing individual assignment to a team member. Students develop and self-select their own tasks to satisfy the learning or project outcomes in a self-organzing team.
• An ABLE Team Member's Journey is from an individual learner, dependent on the teacher to be told the what, when, and how, to a learner as a member of a collaborative self-directed team, in other words, a "self-organized team".

What feedback do you have? How would you describe the roles and responsibilities of an ABLE Team? 

Thank You,
John Miller

Changes:
12/9/12 Changed ABLE Master to ABLE Facilitator.

References:
Based on the Scrum Framework

Agile Learning Objective Board

An example of a ABLE (Agile Based Learning Environment) board for teacher teams to collaboratively develop learning objectives. More details to come. Please comment.

This could also be used by students to develop their own Learning Outcomes for a classroom that is self-directed.

References

Linking Levels, Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria
Jenny Moon, Exeter University

Many Eyes Make Education Bugs Shallow

If you search the Internet, it seems everything in education is broke. I am not one of those who think everything is broke.  I see great things happening in schools everyday by teachers.  I do see problems with education, but it is usually not "fat cat" administrators or teachers who do not care.  There are myriad interplaying causes that play into such a complex system.  Because the issues are so complex and diverse, we need many perspectives at the local, state, and national levels to innovate in schools. "Many eyes makes bugs shallow".

Schools tackle their issues behind their own walls.  Educators try to solve their own problems.  Principals, teachers, and administrators gather.  Board members, parents, and students get involved.  This is the root of the issue. Not many fresh ideas come from one group of like minded people. It is too susceptible to group-think and viewing the problem from very limited perspectives.  Some ideas are creative, but usually, they are slightly outside of a very narrow box.  The gravity of the culture and the "way we do things" are sure to keep many creative ideas from launching.  

In addition, the specialities and expertise are education specific in a school or district.  Yet, we need interdisciplinary approaches and expertise.  Schools need experts in marketing, engineering, business, sales, technology, arts, and pretty much everything else.  There is no way a school district has all of these expertise at highly competent levels, nor, can it afford to hire a set of diverse consultants on call to collaborate with.

We need a continuous circulation of ideas and a diverse set of perspectives in an environment that allows for wild collaboration to happen.  Schools, Districts, and their Departments need a safe place to discuss and collaborate with a diverse and passionate crowd who care about their community and education.  They need a place to interact, discuss, brainstorm, laugh, and learn with many others outside of their walls.  

That is why I am very excited that Gangplank is opening up in Avondale, Arizona, a few miles away from my office.

"Gangplank is a group of connected individuals and small businesses creating an economy of innovation and creativity in the Valley. We envision a new economic engine comprised of collaboration and community, where industries come together to transform our culture." - www.gangplankhq.com

What if we add to this,  "a new education and economic engine comprised of collaboration and community, where industries come together to transform our culture and schools".  Imagine a place where experts and innovators are gathered just to talk and collaborate about opportunities and challenges for schools with District leaders and teachers.  To help shape policies and programs.  To get creative ideas to save money. To find unexpected support and opportunities for students and learning. That circulation of fresh ideas outside of the constraints of District walls, could bring fresh innovation, insights and energy into these walls.  Our biggest opportunities in education lie in the cross-pollination of ideas from other industries and areas. There are benefits of copying and pasting solutions from other Districts, but real innovation happens when exploring and exploiting insights and ideas from outside of your own industry.

Of course, it needs to be a safe environment, not one where reporters and mad bloggers are trying to get a story to rub the school's or District's nose in.  It must be able to be open and have vulnerable-based trust in the collaborators.  Perhaps nondisclosure agreements or some other measure of protection. The quickest way for Districts to retreat and fortify behind their walls is bad press.

Gangplank Chandler - Collaborative Space

I have visited and spoke with Gangplank in Chandler many times.  It is an experience which is hard to describe.  People gathered in small groups, sometimes moving between different groups, working on podcasts, playing guitars, designing a new product, or launching a business. A self-organizing primordial ooze of creativity, passions, and ideas.

In fact, I cross-pollinated many of the ideas I saw there into the Technology Department I lead.  I took their collaborative space concept, based on a Cave and Commons approach, and organized our department space in a similar fashion.  When Heatsync Labs, a hackerspace, was setup at Gangplank, is when I first saw kids talking about geometry, without a teacher around or homework assignment due, as they were using a 3D printer and Arduino broads to create real things.  I quickly saw how powerful that could be in the classroom. Today, students are creating and making real things at one of our middle schools with 3D printing. My department was already heading down the road to use Scrum, but, Derek and Jade, who have used Scrum for many years, let my team come to see how they did Scrum at a master level.   Gangplank also triggered my idea of Student Innovation Centers. I thought, "Why can't every school have an open, interdisciplinary, and  collaborative space like this at their school?". If Gangplank was not an opensource environment, I never would have had these insights.  We would be the "same old" department you can see in any District, not a hub of collaboration and innovation. Schools and Districts do not need more of the "same old".

I plan on bringing my team to Gangplank frequently and often, discovering new and diverse ideas, and attracting other creatives at Gangplank to brainstorm how to innovate learning through technology.  I hope other schools and Districts do the same, not just at the Tech Department level, but principals, teachers, administrators, students, and parents.  Let's make educations bugs shallow by stepping outside of District walls and allowing innovations and solutions emerge in a collaborative and immensely diverse community space, one that encourages wild ideas, like the one Gangplank offers.

John Miller
The Agile School Blog
agileschools@gmail.com
http://www.facebook.com/AgileSchools


Obvious Disclaimer: These opinions are my own, not that of my employer, wife, daughter, state, country, political party, the barista that gives me my coffee, hair stylist, gardener, etc...