Last week, we spent a morning introducing agile practices to the high school teachers of Argyle Secondary in North Vancouver, BC Canada. In British Columbia, schools have Professional Development (Pro-D) Days that are used as a “time to work with colleagues to further their skills and engage in a broad range of professional development activities”. This is time spent outside of the usual classroom space to learn and retrospect on what is working and what needs to be done differently.

Led by Dave Sharrock, the teaching staff learned about the empirical process and how continual inspection and adaptation leads to improvement. With over 40 people in the room, the ball game led to some high scores and learning how to improve scores. They also learned how limiting their work in progress and visualizing their work can decrease completion time of tasks.

Unlike more traditional agile workshops, there was no focus on software releases or DevOps.  Instead the discussions were centered around how agile methodologies could be used in their setting. The session was highly interactive, and small groups practiced planning their work on Kanban boards for the first time.