Agile Classrooms: Student-Centered Learning with The Agile Mind's Jessica Cavallaro

Want to change your approach to teaching? Join us with Jessica Cavallaro, co-founder of The Agile Mind, as she uncovers the transformative power of Agile methodologies in the classroom. Discover how Jessica embraced Agile principles, reshaping her educational environment into a vibrant space of collaboration and student-driven problem-solving. This episode promises to equip educators and parents alike with innovative strategies for creating a more engaging and effective learning experience, moving from outdated, push-based methods to a more dynamic, pull-based approach where students take the reins of their own education.

We delve deep into practical ways of implementing Agile in educational settings, such as breaking down larger units into manageable tasks and using tools like Kanban boards to foster accountability and transparency. Learn how dynamic planning and visual work-tracking can significantly enhance student engagement and responsibility. Jessica shares real-life experiences about the initial challenges and ultimate benefits of integrating Agile, including the profound impact on team dynamics and efficiency. This is not just theory—it's a blueprint for transforming your classroom into a hub of continuous improvement and active learning!

To learn more about The Agile Mind, you can go to https://www.the-agile-mind.com/ or reach out to Jessica directly at jessica@theagilemind.com and listen to their bi-weekly podcast The Agile Teachers' Lounge!

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:10

Welcome to the Brighter Side of Education. I'm your host, dr Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? In this episode, we explore the integration of agile methodologies into teaching and learning practices as an innovative way to meet the demands of modern education.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:44

The educational landscape is undergoing significant transformations due to globalizations, rapid technological advancements and shifts in labor market demands. These changes make it necessary for students to develop a diverse spectrum of skills and competencies to secure employment. So today we're discussing an innovative approach known as Agile in education. Agile is an instructional design model that incorporates a set of principles originally designed for software development and applies them directly to the instructional design process. Its methodologies emphasize collaboration, self-direction, incremental progress and iteration. Agile learning can be seen as a contemporary extension of the student-centered and project-based learning approaches, providing a practical framework for its application in modern classrooms. Joining me today to dive deeper into how agile practices can transform teaching methods and better prepare students for the future, jessica Cavallaro. Jessica is the co-founder of the Agile Mind, the chief academic officer of Citizens High School, a coach and a consultant. Welcome to the show, jessica.

Jessica Cavallaro: 1:54

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 1:57

Yeah, we were just talking about Agile and I had first heard of it just recently. Over the past few months, I'm excited to learn more about it and how it can help teachers and students. So what methodologies does Agile have for the classroom? That inspired you to start the Agile Mind?

Jessica Cavallaro: 2:17

Thank you for asking. Agile came to me in an email actually.

Jessica Cavallaro: 2:22

It's the origin story, right? Yeah, it's that I've been an educator my whole life. All I've ever done is be inside of a classroom. I was a student, then I went to college, then I got out and I worked with children. I went right back into the classroom and so and this sounds a little strange, but sometimes when you get into that field like that, you get blind to what is out there. And as I was going through my career, I was very much into project-based learning and design thinking, so really trying to bring in innovative practices. And one day I got an email that said would you like to learn about scrum? And I said that is a really funny word.

Jessica Cavallaro: 2:55

So I Googled it and I started reading about it. I said, oh my God, this is my classroom, it's just what adults do, and so I read. So I read the book and I just dove straight in and this was in the middle of COVID. I worked at a private school at the time. I had half my kids in person, half my kids online. Everything was disrupted and my kids were really suffering and I said you know, this is the perfect opportunity to try something like this, Because what I've recognized immediately is that Agile is a human based system. It's based on how people interact and grow and work together, and there was nothing that we all needed more during COVID than more connection with each other and more ways to be human to each other, and it really jumped out to me.

Jessica Cavallaro: 3:39

So that is when I just started to dabble and I started to look things up and I started to look around at the resources and I said, you know what? I can take all of my lesson plans, my pre-existing curriculum, all of the things that I already do, and I can make small little shifts to it. And if I train the kids, the classroom will run itself. And that was kind of my hypothesis going into that year. I had nothing to lose, so I just launched it and worked on a basic framework of human-based interaction.

Jessica Cavallaro: 4:09

So we have teams. There are diverse teams based on talent. We use visual tools like a Kanban board to visualize our work and to have transparency and to aid in communication so that we all know what we're doing. We have real life problems that we're solving with our curriculum and I taught the kids and it was incredible. And so that year, while education in general was suffering and teachers were suffering and it was it was a really hard year for everyone around my classroom buzzed and by the end of the year I would go around to my students and say, hey, do you need help? And they'd go no, we've got it, thanks. It was buzzing with activity and excitement and conversation. My kids were doing their own work. They were excited about it, so it changed everything and at that point it was like we need to spread this word to other people. Teachers need to hear about this that there's better ways of working and learning.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 4:58

Yeah, absolutely. At that time I had the same thing going Private school half my class was in person, half my class was at home, and then I had applied some distance education theory into my class and I would agree. I think that those who were trying to apply theories or methodologies and pedagogy to their classroom something different, outside of what the traditional classroom was saw more success in their classrooms that year. So you wrote an article called Push Versus Pull and you described the traditional classroom as a push-based system of learning and iAgile as a pull-based system. So can you explain what you meant by this?

Jessica Cavallaro: 5:38

Absolutely so. In traditional education, especially as the way it's evolved till now, everything kind of rolls downhill. Education has become more and more of a standard in society, right, and so we get more and more tasks, but then they roll onto the shoulders of the teacher, and so the teacher is doing so many different things and the way very much in a push-based system, especially with our older students, but even with our young students the students come in, they have their place, they sit down.

Jessica Cavallaro: 6:05

They're expected to be quiet, they're expected to be obedient, they're expected to pay attention, they're expected to do what they're told. And so they come in. They lose all autonomy. They sit there the teacher gets up in front and the teacher pushes content. They decide what content is being taught, they decide how fast it's going, they decide what the activity is for the day, they decide what the rules are for the system and then you have to get up and change and go to another person's totally different system and align to it as a child.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 6:32

Yes.

Jessica Cavallaro: 6:33

That's learning self-regulation. So when you really think about it, if you put yourself into that desk or into that spot in circle time, the teacher is pushing everything towards you and you're just expected to take it and know it. And that's it. You're not active in that interaction whatsoever, and it becomes burdensome for the teacher, because now the teacher is fully responsible for all of your learning. Did they cover the facts, did they?

Jessica Cavallaro: 6:59

do a good job. So none of it's your responsibility as a student anymore. It's all the teachers, and that's the burden that's sitting on teachers' shoulders right now, and so what we propose with Agile is that it should be a pull-based system where you, the teacher, are not the pusher, you're the facilitator, is to build the system which the student lives within and then the student comes in and, depending on the age, because it's all depending on executive functioning and growth skills, and things like that.

Jessica Cavallaro: 7:32

But the students pull information so you say here's the unit or here's the project. Here's the wide open question, which is slightly different from an essential question, because an essential question typically has one answer, but a wide open question has a variety of it and you can answer it however you want, as long as you apply the knowledge from the lesson. It's real world based. So there's purpose in the lesson and the students are put into groups and you know we can get into the details of all of this. But then you know, through Kanban boards and coaching from the teacher, they pull. So they have like a list of work that they can do and activities and they as a group have to discuss what work are they pulling, how are they scheduling their day or their week, depending on how old they are, what work is going to be completed, and then they need to check it over before they turn it into the teacher. So the whole group has consensus that the work is done and it's up to their standards and they're in charge of that. So not only then are our students being responsible. They're learning independence. They're also learning executive functioning skills. They're learning collaboration skills, communication skills. They're learning all of the AI proof skills that are completely essential. You know I was saying this in 2020, but now it's 2024 and we're all using AI to do everything. Our students need to know how to work in teams. Our students need to have space to develop those AI-approved skills of communication and active listening and how do you understand divergent points of view and how do you come to consensus. Those are all skills that we expect students pick up somewhere we don't give them the opportunity to do, and so, in this setting, then the teacher gets to do the things that we all actually signed up to do, which is work with students. I can sit with Tommy if he has processing issues and help him process. If Amy is shooting away because she's so awesome at it, I prompt her with extra questions and get her to do extra tasks, but it doesn't feel like I'm loading it on her. So the students are getting more personalized attention from the teacher.

Jessica Cavallaro: 9:35

The teacher can work in small groups. I can come to your group and say hey, what are you guys working on? Do you need help? Have you thought of this? Have you looked into this? But those conversations are genuine and authentic, so you get a lot more of those light bulb moments and, as a teacher, we all know we didn't get into this for the paycheck. We got into this for the light bulb moments and seeing student growth. And you get to see it because you're not crowding 30 kids into a room and then trying to hold their attention, because you're dancing in the front, you know, and then dealing with classroom management issues, because they're not the same. You're getting the students to work on things that they want to work on and you're working in small groups or personalize that learning without burning yourself out. I was a middle school and high school teacher. I can tell you if I did five periods of doing small group instruction where I walked around and had real conversations, groups of lecture, I was exhausted at the end of the five periods of lecture.

Jessica Cavallaro: 10:30

But, authentic conversation just makes you have more energy. It saved me as a teacher.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 10:36

Those are always my favorite moments when they were curious and they wanted to know more, and then they were digging deeper, deeper into the content and then they had really good questions and application to real life. So what kind of small changes can teachers do to shift education in their classrooms from a push to a pull-based system of learning?

Jessica Cavallaro: 10:54

That's a great question, and the whole idea of Agile just to kind of go back to that bigger picture for a second is how humans interact with each other, how they work together and how they complete large tasks together. So, as you described in the beginning, thank you so much for giving the history is that it started with sophomore management. So it's about like these huge projects, and they were trying to plan out these huge projects as we do with curriculum, and they were often over budget, and then the first part would fall apart and then it would go over budget and over time. So then the one would be, so then the third one, you know, and that kind of static planning always fails.

Jessica Cavallaro: 11:28

So we need dynamic planning, and so if we could take that lesson from software engineering into the classroom is that we want to be able to shift and move. I know we need to cover our standards. I know we need to, you know, do our testing and things like that. I'm not oblivious to the system that we live in, but we need to be more dynamic in there. And so the other part of Agile that makes it great is that it's constant small improvements. So you're just looking at the project and you're breaking it down into small tasks and then, as those tasks are completed, you can move on to the next one. So it's small changes that result in huge gains at the end, and so you want to think about that. If you were an engineer, you would think about that and go oh, okay. And as a teacher, we say no, no, no just do the whole unit.

Jessica Cavallaro: 12:12

It's like, hey, break it apart one week at a time.

Jessica Cavallaro: 12:15

What can we do? And that can start by changing that essential question to a wide open question. So, instead of the students playing the game of education where they know that there's one answer and they're just going to get you that one answer and they're going to Google it or use chat, gpt, and then it's going to be done and then they'll fake the rest of their work, if it's a wide open question, they actually need to learn the information to apply it to a real life issue. So like they have to dig deeper. So there's that buy-ins, if you want to get into just running sprints. So breaking down that unit and telling the kids that we're running design sprints through it, so that's one week if you're older, or even one day if you're younger, and saying, here's the tasks that we're going to do. I want you to choose the order that you do them in, but they must be done in this time period. You're giving kids choice, you're giving them some autonomy and they're excited because you're giving them some autonomy and they're excited because you're giving them those choices, that they're able to get them done. So break it down into a day or a period and then lengthen it out as your students get used to it. Other things are using Kanban boards, and so that is a visual tool. That's all that it is. It's typically four lanes that students put tasks on it in terms of cards, and so the lanes are backlog to do, doing and done. And so let's say we're going to write an essay. We would have the students break it down, so you model it with them the first couple of times. But you know what are the parts of an essay. First you write the intro. Well, what's the intro? First you write the thesis, then you get the background information, so you break it down, those small tasks, and then you say, pick what you're going to do today, put it into to do and discuss it as a team. Then, when you're actually working on it, pull it into doing. So everyone in your group knows what you're doing and what you're working on, and then you can have a revision column if you want. I like this one. And that is everyone has to check the work before it moves to done, and it done, it can move into the teacher. And so they're literally pulling. So again that pull system, they're pulling work across the board and it's visual. So when I did this, I had them up all over my walls so I could literally sit at my desk and see where every group was, and that holds them accountable, because now Sammy can't come in and say well, I didn't know we were working on this and I didn't know when the deadline was. Because it's visual, they can see if they get sidetracked. Those teams are pulling ahead. They have five cards in done and we only have three cards in done. So it helps them develop that check. Of course, as a teacher, you're going to need to prompt them a little, but it helps make that work visual. So then everyone's communicating and everyone's on the same space, and that's a really minor change is to just say we're just going to put our work for the day up on this system and we're just going to pull it and I just want to see it. I just want to see how this works as an experiment.

Jessica Cavallaro: 14:56

When I first did this with my students, I introduced the project it was a six week project and all the students in the classroom went oh, and I said why, and they said we hate group projects. And I said why. And I said why? And they said we hate group projects. And I said why? And they said because this one doesn't do their work. And then I do all my work and then I stay up till 3am and then this one doesn't do this. And I said, okay, I hear you, let's try to put your whole project up on a Kanban board. And they did it. And they spent 45 minutes discussing with their team how to put it up. And it was just the beginning of it. It wasn't solved in 45 minutes whatsoever, but afterwards we had a reflective conversation. I said how do you feel after you started to put your work on a Kanban? And they said oh my God, I feel so much better. We're responsible for our work. We're putting our resources up on here, we're making notes up on here. We can all see it. We all share responsibility.

Jessica Cavallaro: 15:46

The feedback, I mean they saw it within a half hour of playing with it. We all share responsibility. The feedback, I mean they saw it within a half hour of playing with it and it really eliminates all of those issues that we see with projects in general in education. So, like those are some of the small things. They're so. They're so small when you start them and again, those results are huge because your kids then fly through a project. So you think it's going to be six weeks, now it's five, because they finished early. The number of parent emails comes down. Susie's not standing at your desk crying because she did all the work, because Benjamin didn't do any of his work. Those things are eliminated and if you learn how to scaffold it properly, then the students really take agency in themselves, because now they're not coming to you with every question, they're coming to you with very specific questions. I don't know how to apply this instead of just saying I don't know.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 16:33

And what I love about this is the self-directed learning when it comes to pace, so not everybody has to be doing everything at the exact same time in class. You're allowing for those differences and I saw that, like, kanban boards can be electronic or you can have it on a chalkboard, a paper, so when you're saying you could see them all, what were you imagining them being on?

Jessica Cavallaro: 16:56

Oh. So when I first started, I was lucky, extremely lucky, and I had full whiteboard walls painted with the special stuff, and so we put up painter's tape and we made the boxes. And the kids got Post-its and I let them choose funny names like RoboCop. They got to take full ownership of it and all of their boards look different. So they got to color code it themselves, they got to name it themselves, they got to draw it themselves and then, as we move forward, we went online.

Jessica Cavallaro: 17:20

I use Kanban Zone. I use it in my professional life. As a chief academic officer of a high school, I use it to oversee the entire school. I use it in my personal life for my to-do tasks. I use it for my kids to organize their tours. I use Kanban boards everywhere. But you can look into Kanban Zone or Trello or any one of these have electronic ones, and then those are really great too. I've put students on those as well, because the amount of information you can keep on a card is huge. So for your older kids, you can put a whole research project on a Kanban board and then they don't lose their things because everything gets attached to a card oh wonderful.

Jessica Cavallaro: 17:58

And then you put attachments to them and you could tie cards together, say like this card can't move without that card, so an entire student's whole research project can move with them, and then it can't get lost. It's so nice and the whole team can collaborate on the same platform at the same time. So you can never say like, well, I can't type because Mike's typing Like no, you get in there.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 18:19

So then, this is for project-based learning, but how can it be used to learn content and skills?

Jessica Cavallaro: 18:26

Absolutely so. When it comes to Kanban, boards are just visual tools. They're not specialized to agile, they're not specialized to project-based learning. So if you were a traditional teacher and you just wanted to keep track of things, it's the same thing. You would put your lessons in the cards and the students would pull them across. So, in terms of you know, if I was teaching a math lesson and I was a traditional teacher, I would say, okay, we're doing fractions, then we're overview, and then numerators and denominators, and then how to add, how to subtract, and I might have like sub cards in there, but then the students would see so like it's declarative. So the students know what to anticipate, what's coming. Okay, you're not hiding anything from them. They see the assessments, they know, and then you can even model, just bringing it across for them and showing them and saying like we're going to pull this to here and this is what we're doing next.

Jessica Cavallaro: 19:16

So if you want to just start it really slow, there's no reason that you have to feel over your head in anything that has to do with agile practices, because it's all as slow and as easy as you want to make it, because it's personalized to you, to your classroom, to your kids. It's not, it's not a system that I say no, no, no, this is how you do it, cause I like to do it this way. It's hey, tell me about your classroom. How do you like to teach? How can we start to move that responsibility off your shoulders and onto your students' shoulders? What would you like to experiment with? Let's run a small one, and so it can just be introducing it into your classroom and using it and letting the kids see it. That's what I did. I had one over my desk and the kids were like, what are you doing? And I was like, oh, I'm planning my week and then next week. And they were like, oh, that's great, how do you do it? I explained it, and then the next week they're doing it, but it's, you know, small, because I swear they have big results.

Jessica Cavallaro: 20:08

You don't need to overhaul things. You don't need to throw away your curriculum. You don't need to throw away your favorite project or the thing that you love doing with your student for years. It is. Let's transfer the ownership of all this learning from my shoulders to your shoulders, and so you can add in. You know your standards, your standards are still covered and as for skill development, you're facilitating that through small group instruction. A lot of the things that we do in school. We try to standardize them so we can push them through like a machine. But people aren't machines and students aren't going to learn empathy because we did it in advisory and we read it to them and we said empathy is important, you should have empathy towards your friends, and then they go. Okay, that's great.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:51

I know how to answer this question. You're going to give me the question. I'm going to answer it because I'm in this class. You've just told me this yeah, and then we're moving on. Yes, that's exactly. There's no application.

Jessica Cavallaro: 20:59

But here we are, we're in a team and you come my homework. Last night my dog was sick and then we all say, oh, I'm really sorry about that, can we?

Jessica Cavallaro: 21:14

help you pick up some slack. That's actual empathy. Yeah, you know, and that's that's the only things you get are from working with other human beings, and that's why I like to say agile is human based. And keeping our kids in desks and in rows and separate and silent, we're not getting those skills and we can't directly teach how to be a human being, you can't teach empathy, you can't teach communication and active listening. You actually have to do it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 21:37

So the benefits for students are collaboration, the empathy, being able to have that humanistic touch, and then the teachers seeing all of the information so that it's more visually appealing, not only for the students but for them easier to keep track of. They're having more authentic conversations with their students. So what other kinds of benefits are there? I know that there's a lot for students and teachers. I'm just thinking about what you were just talking about.

Jessica Cavallaro: 22:02

I love the way that it uplifts everyone that uses it. We say it's not another thing, it's the thing that's going to clear those things. So we're taking things off of your plate. Is that, with that transfer from push to pull, you're then putting that ownership on the students? So like, let's say, you get a phone call from a parent we all get those and they say Tommy, didn't understand what was going on. So then you have a conference and you say, tommy, walk your mom through the Kanban board.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 22:27

Right.

Jessica Cavallaro: 22:27

Or the students take pictures of their Kanban board, whether it's visual or not, and post it on their LMS systems, and so here's our board. Let's show mom how we use this. Let's clear up the question Right here. I laid out the whole week of instruction ahead of time. I know that you said you were going to be absent on Tuesday, but here's everything for the week ahead of time. You can pull it at any time, but here's everything for the week ahead of time. You can pull it at any time, and the way that I did it was I would tape my lessons and make videos of me going over rubrics and things so that students can watch them anytime that they wanted to. So if my students' first period were asleep, they weren't coming back to me the next day saying I just don't understand research cards, because I would say the video's there in your backlog. Go, rewatch the video and then come back to me with your specific questions.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 23:10

That's a great idea.

Jessica Cavallaro: 23:11

So like when your kids are asleep, first period okay, that's okay. Yeah, you're human, you're allowed to be sleepy. You have to have that lesson done by Friday.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 23:25

Figure out the time to do it and if you genuinely do it at 3am and that's what works for your body at that time. Okay, but you're giving them those resources to be able to use or reuse or access at their time, their leisure, and that fits into their schedule when they need it, not necessarily when we're telling them and they're sitting in front of us, because I know sometimes things are running through my mind even when I'm sitting and you're like, oh my gosh, I just missed it. That was really important.

Jessica Cavallaro: 23:53

So if everyone is aware of those resources, that is so valuable when it comes to time management for you, then you reuse them. I'm a social studies teacher, so when I make a video about how to make a research card, that video you're hearing it's done now and with our rubrics. It's going through the rubrics and really explaining so that students aren't sitting there 12 hours before the project is doing and going. What does she mean? Because, I'm reading you the rubric and saying when I mean this? This is what I mean.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 24:16

So you could be in face-to-face. You could use that in an online class, you could do it for a hybrid, for some sort of blended learning, so it works in any environment when it comes to the classroom. So that's a great tip.

Jessica Cavallaro: 24:29

Absolutely. And it's pull-based because you're telling your kids pull the information when it's necessary for you. Pull it Not when it's when I feel like doing it, but pull it when it's good for you, and it teaches them how to regulate themselves. It's teaching them subtly and not explicitly, but time management skills, so like it's going to be done by Friday, right, I'm going to help you. I'm here as a resource, but you need to pull because, realistically, you cannot pull all of this on Thursday night. It's just, it's the whole suite of executive functioning skills is like yeah, I can't start this essay because this essay is going to take me three hours. Yeah, but writing the background for your introduction paragraph is going to take you 20 minutes. Do you have 20 minutes? And when you use whether it's Kanban zone or it's a real board, you get that tactical response. You're getting that serotonin from moving it across and you're getting that physical movement and I think our kids don't get enough movement either. That helps them self-regulate.

Jessica Cavallaro: 25:27

There's so many benefits in terms of what we need our students to be working on to prepare themselves for success later in life. We don't need them to practice on being quiet or practice on them waiting for instructions. You know, when we look at hiring trends they say one of the top skills is adaptability. Can you change, can you think outside of the box, can you be creative, can you problem solve, can you make decisions, can you prioritize which one of those things are taught in a traditional classroom and then allowed to really be mastered? Listen, it's going to be clunky when you start, but by the end of the year your students really you see a huge development in their independence.

Jessica Cavallaro: 26:04

And then think about what would happen if it's all throughout the classes or you started in elementary school. How responsible would those students be by middle school if they learned executive functioning skills all the way up?

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 26:16

Then how much more excited would they be to come into class every day and, as a teacher, not to be so exhausted at the end of the day but to be having those authentic conversations that kind of just make everybody excited to be there and to be learning. I think that it makes it kind of exciting to be in that environment all day. So what other ways do you at the Agile Mind help support teachers?

Jessica Cavallaro: 26:37

So we formed as a company that works with teachers. So we do a little bit of work with students Sometimes we do student classes but we prioritize teachers and administrators as well, because we can also do this with administrators. And think about this how great would it be to not sit in meetings all day because you were commuting, hating through a Kanban board. If you put all of your work, let's say you know you're running a private school and you have a board to meet with. If you have a Kanban board, that's just board meeting notes and prioritization then your board members can check in instead of emailing you every time they need you. Or you can see how your entire English department is planning something. And then you can see workflow all the way down to the teachers. So when the teachers say to you I'm stressed and I'm burned out, and you can pull up their board and say, oh, my goodness, you had 13 meetings in the last two weeks. That's a lot and you can visually see it, instead of just saying, oh, that's Marie and she just complained and he just doesn't like meetings. No, no, no, you're seeing it, you can see it.

Jessica Cavallaro: 27:35

So we do trainings with administrators and teachers, called Learning Flow and Workflow and we have a leadership training that we do as well, and with our teachers. We like to meet with them, get to know them and then coach you for a month, six weeks really a lot of time. We're not interested in walking into a school and shooting off a confetti gun and saying here's my book, getting you amped, and then when you hit a bump, you drop it because you're stressed and you can't handle it. It's there for long-term mindset change, because shifting that push to pull is a mindset change. It's a change of culture. Culture is hard to change, so we do, you know, like little groups. In two to three times a week, we meet and say like, hey, let's review your board, how is it going, how is your planning? And say like, hey, let's review your board, how is it going, how is your planning, how can we assist? And then those check-ins are for as long as you need them to be. So is it 15 minutes, cause that's what your lunch period is like. Do you wanna talk for an hour? And we can talk it through and plan. That's what learning flow looks like.

Jessica Cavallaro: 28:33

We're also, with the grace of AI, able to. Well, we're working on a brand new AI system so you could drop in your standards and it'll help you generate wide open questions, activities, how to build your backlog learning objectives. And you can do it from like the high level of like teacher, where you're planning out a unit, to the smallest level, where you're planning day-to-day lesson plans and you're saying, hey can like, let's look at this, and so it takes your essential questions and changes them into wide open questions and so it really helps us get you moving. Yes, we just say here, take your favorite lesson, put it in here, let's talk about the changes and how you can implement this, how you're shifting that responsibility onto your students so that you're creating this different kind of culture. And listen, there's hiccups along the way, but it's a huge help when you're not asking teachers to generate everything themselves.

Jessica Cavallaro: 29:23

We even do rubrics slightly differently. We don't do full rubrics, we do one lane rubrics. We ask the kids to fill them in. So I fill out the proficiency and then you have to grade yourself before it turns it in, because you have to reflect and say is this under or is this over over? Because very often we remove that responsibility from kids, right? So you see, you have your high flyers that go above and beyond, but they never get to tell you about it.

Jessica Cavallaro: 29:47

So they don't get acknowledged for their above and beyond, but they can tell you in the rubric what's their above and beyond. Or your students are like listen, you said five facts, I gave you four. Four was what I was doing, but they have to reflect on it. So when they get it back they can't say to you I don't understand why I only got an 80.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:08

I love that. What ownership I've never heard of anyone doing like anything like that.

Jessica Cavallaro: 30:09

It's pretty exciting, and so our new AI generates those rumors for you as well. Really having that is a huge advantage.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:15

And so where could they go for that?

Jessica Cavallaro: 30:17

So we are working on it and we're releasing. We're actually sending it out for testing. So if you are interested in being one of our testers and providing us feedback, we would love to set up some sessions, just jump in some standards and see how it works and provide some information. So if you just reached out to me at the Agile Mind, we can work towards that and we're hoping to have it released by the fall.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:41

Excellent, all right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today to discuss agile learning and how its application in the classroom can benefit teachers and students.

Jessica Cavallaro: 30:50

Thank you for having me, Thank you for listening everyone. It's been such a great opportunity. Thank you again.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 30:57

If you're as excited as I am about the potential of agile in education, I encourage you to take the next step. Start by exploring the agile model and how its principles can be integrated into your teaching practice. To learn more about the agile mind, you can go to wwwthe-agile-mindcom. Forward slash or reach out to Jessica directly at jessicaattheagilemindcom and listen to their bi-weekly podcast, the Agile Teacher's Lounge. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at lisa at drlisarahasslercom, or visit my website at wwwdrlisarahasslercom and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.