Maryse Meinen, Iris Peereboom

Iris (14 y.o.) is currently in her second year of Secondary School education at Agora School Leiden (Netherlands). Education in the Agora system is a unique way of co-creating a purpose driven learning journey for students, shaped by challenges the students organize themselves. Students are responsible for their own learning outcomes – the school enables the learning and does this in an Agile fashion, even if nobody actually mentions Agile.

How does this work? Pupils start with formulating a “challenge” – something you as a student would really like to learn. Nobody forces a challenge on a student, it should stem from the pupil’s own intrinsic curiosity. A student needs to come up with a “why” – the purpose & desired learning outcome of this particular challenge needs to be very clear before a student is allowed to actually start working on the challenge. The next step is formulating what you think you need to complete your challenge and when you would be satisfied with the outcome of the challenge. Students receive feedback continuously - from their coach - throughout the process.

After each challenge students show the results of their work in an open session. And they formulate their own learnings and what they would like to improve next time, which enables inspecting and adapting in the learning journey.

The school provides support where and if needed (topic experts, sometimes a traditional teacher) and coaching (regular coaching sessions with their coach) and mainly trusts students to get the job done.

This will be an interactive session in which Iris will explain how the school system works and how she experiences this. Together we will show the connection with Agility. And… we also offer you the opportunity to formulate your own learning challenge - there must be something you have always wanted to find out more about! We will do this in the Agora School way and facilitate you coming up with your own “why” and “this is done when” for your learning challenge.

Have you always wondered how to apply Agile principles in Secondary School and how this might work out? This is your opportunity to find out how this actually flows!

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Proposed Length of Session: 60 minute interactive session - in which Iris tells us about her school, we make the connection with agile principles and we craft our own challenge and give each other feedback on this in small groups.

Learning outcomes:

1) knowing how agility is being applied at secondary schools (Agora)

2) designing (hands-on) a personal learning challenge in the Agile Agora Way

Session style: a mixture between talk & interaction

Outline of presentation/session:

• introduction (8 minutes)
• Agora Education (10 minutes)
• Agility in Agora (7 minutes, 5 mins Q&A about what other agile principles the participants see / discover)
• 1 - 3 - all for the learning challenge ( for yourself, in groups of three, sharing back in the whole group) (15 mins)
• Wrap up & closure (5 mins)
• Q&A / extra time

Prerequisites required of attendees: none

Level: Introductory

Short biography of the presenter(s): Will be provided later

Any additional information: proposal, interaction / facilitation design AND this written text actually written by Iris herself - she just got some help with the English. We’ll do the connection with agility together, and facilitate the interaction together. but it really is Iris who is submitting!