 We welcome all of you to the session, how can agility transform education to prepare students for the future? This will be delivered by Jessica Kevalro and Roslyn Jackson. Jessica is an innovator and a changemaker in education. She co-founded the agile mind while teaching in hybrid setting as a way to build collaboration, connection, and communication in her classroom. She has always been an early adopter of techniques that will bring more student agency and active learning in the classroom. Roslyn is currently working as an educational agility consultant at the agile mind. She's good at problem solving, wife, mother, teacher, and a student. She strongly believes in working collaboratively with people to create solutions that help others achieve their goals, and she is very much happy about it. Without further delay, I'll hand it over to Jessica and Roslyn. Okay. Good evening to everyone in India and good morning to people from the United States that may be listening as well. We are excited to be here. I'm going to share my screen with you and get started. Please feel free to put any questions in the chat as we go. We want to make it in the Q&A session chat. We want to make it as interactive as possible. You could go ahead and raise your hand or you can put the question in the chat and Vijay will be kind enough to pause us so we can answer your questions as we go. Okay. So the purpose of our company to agile mind is that we want to bring real world skills to K-12 education and make sure that we are empowering students to get started their own education and be engaged while they are learning before they enter the room. So a couple of things that we're going to go over in our short presentation, the status of K-12 education, particularly from our view in the United States, we found that these things are similar no matter where you are in the world. What we want to ask you, what you think you could change in K-12 education based on your own experiences. What things do you now use that you think would be more effective for students to know while they are in the K-12 education kind of setting? We want to know or share with you the benefits that we've experienced with having an agile kind of classroom of mindset in education. Then bottom line, we want you to spread the word about the information that we're sharing here with you today. So hi everyone, I'm Jessica, and we're going to start off with what impact education is having on the world today. So there's main stakeholders in this education system that we rarely speak about. We talk about the education system as a whole, but we really need to break it down into the individuals that we're affecting and the stakeholders that are most important in this system. So we start with the student, because the student is the client that we should be talking about all the time. What is the student experienced? Right now, we're seeing worldwide that student performance is down post-COVID after that two-year break. Students are not able to come back and re-engage. There's a lack of socialization, there's a lack of skill accruity, and students, quite honestly, are not engaged the way that they used to be, because they have had two years of basically either not learning or self-study where they can pull the information that they want, and they're learning on their own wavelength that they no longer engage with the curriculum that is standardized by the state or government. So the students are not having that buy-in, they're not seeing that purpose, and therefore the struggle to get students to engage and learn becomes more difficult. So a second stakeholder that's important to address are the parents. Parents, because of the experience that we have with COVID, because I'm a parent too, so is Jessica, you've seen firsthand why your students might be complaining, you've seen firsthand maybe the lack of rigor in the curriculum, the lack of interest that your students have in the curriculum. And you're concerned that what they're learning may not be successfully preparing them for the future. If the focus is on content, but they don't have the skills that you know that they need in the business world, it raises some red flags and concerns that you might want to have addressed in the curriculum moving forward. We also have the teacher impact. So in America, we're dealing with what's called teacher burnout. Teachers are leaving the system in record numbers. They feel that there is a lack of agency. So what's going on here is that the state or the federal government is handing out curriculum to teachers so they have no input into how they teach. Everything is standardized. There's lots of testing. And other places around the world that we've spoken to, the teachers don't feel that the curriculum is realistic. There's too much to cover. They know teachers are specialized and have a great education in how to teach and what learning should look like and realize that the curriculum does not follow the organic way of learning and it's forcing them to do an unnatural job which puts stress on them from the feedback from the other stakeholders. So what we want to do is to ask you very quickly if you could put in the chat or if you want to chime in and just speak and tell us what did your K-12 experience look and feel like? So we want to give you about 30 to 60 seconds to either put that in the chat or to come on and share it with us. If you can talk, we'd love to hear your voices, especially because we haven't been in an Indiana school. So please fill us in. All right, so Vijay, if you have any comments in the chat, if not, we can keep moving and maybe some more comments. No comments as of now. And Tim, if you want to speak, you know, audience, just raise your hand. I will allow you to speak here. So we're gonna move forward, but always feel free to interrupt us. We'd like to have interactive and we are educators. So we're used to being interrupted. So it's okay with us. Exactly. So we want to think about what a day looks like for our students, put ourselves in our students' places and what are they doing day to day? And so, you know, in elementary school, kids come in, they go into circle time, they have lots of transition, there's a little bit more movement, but it's a lot of work that happens seated. It's a lot of work that happens individually. It's a lot of work. That goes against the way that kids naturally learn, kids naturally play. As kids get older and they start to transition classes, as students actually begin to blossom into social beings in middle school and high school, we isolate them either further. If they travel from class to class, they only have three minutes to talk, they have to go into a seat that they didn't choose. They're being spoken to by a teacher who's pushing information towards them. They're expected to be passive and just take in the information they're not expected to engage with it. They're not expected to speak to each other. And I want you to really think about like, how did that make you feel when you were someone that age that was interested in making social connections and interested in the world? Did that heighten your interest in the world? Was that kind of movement throughout your day, the way that you really wanted to spend your day? And so, that's what our classrooms all across America and all across the world really look like. They look like the pictures in the next slide where deser and rose, students are passive, teachers in the front, the teacher is giving information. And when you think about the way if you have children or have seen children, the way that children learn is play-based. They go through the world, they want to know what's going on, they pick up the things that they're interested in, they try to build new connections, they try to build context around them. So sitting like this in these silent kind of rooms with one person directing all of the information is really inorganic to the way that human beings learn. Yet this is what our whole entire education system is based on. And something that's important about this as well, another important catch phrase that goes around a lot is classroom management. So a lot of school and it's schools and administrators and teachers quite frankly, we think that having the students in rows, having them quiet, not having them be able to collaborate all the time or frequently is, it shows strong classroom management. What it really shows is control and it's sucking all of the creativity and ingenuity and engagement out of the students. And what we're going to share hopefully in this presentation is out of the teachers as well. So that way the classroom, all the life is kind of sucked out of the classroom in the name of classroom management sometimes. And we want to try to share ways with you that we think can reverse that. So to redo education or to reimagine what it should look like, we want to know what is the purpose of school? So we kind of grow up just thinking, okay, when you get to this age, you go to school, you go to school to this age and then you graduate and then you go get your job. But when you stop for just a couple of moments and really think what is the purpose of school? And if you would like to interact here, please, raise your hand so that VJ can unmute you or write it in the chat. But what do you think the purpose of school actually is? Is it just our daycare center so we can go to work? Is it, why do we send our kids there all day? And why are our teachers there? Right, is it just to learn facts? Is it just to learn content? Is it just to learn things that they can Google? When you go to work, does your boss want you to just share everything you know or does he want you to solve problems? Does he or she hire you for certain skills that you have so that you can solve problems for your company or your business's customers or do your customers or your boss just want you to share everything that you learned at school? So for us, the purpose of education is to prepare kids for our future. And what that means is something that's completely different from what education started out to be. When standardized education really started to flourish, it was about going out and getting a job in a factory. It was about doing manual labor. It was about being a cog in the machine is that someone told you what to do when you went and did it. Education was meant to give you facts that you had to carry throughout your life because you did not have access to the facts at the tips of your fingers like you do now. So you had to learn about the world. You had to really understand it and then you needed to carry it through life. So someone that had that information because it wasn't widely available had to push it into your head and then make sure that you maintained it so that you can go out as an adult and carry that information around the world with you. Now the world has incredibly changed. And so we're looking at the idea that there's information all around us. Information can be easily found. Information can be easily applied. So the idea of the purpose of school has to change too because we're not the same people that are functioning in the same way in the same kind of society that we were before. Now we don't need to memorize all of human history. We don't need to memorize the periodic table. We don't need to memorize every battle in history and every scientific equation because we can look it up. What we need to do is we need to prepare our students to be problem solvers for complex problems that face our society. They need to be able to apply different pieces of information from different areas to build strong connections. They need to learn how to collaborate and work in teams. They need critical thinking skills. And these skills cannot be found from a push-based system where a teacher tells you about what's going on in the world and you passively sit there. You must interact. So this is what a classroom looks like when students are able to move around when they're able to take their information and manipulate it so that they are building connections to their own schema. They're working within teams. They're problem solving. They're building those critical thinking skills and they're building cognitive flexibility. So we are advocating for our kind of agile education and where we bring in the agile mindset that we all really love, I'm assuming because we're at our agile conference. And that fits the way that we work and bring it down into the school so that students can learn it while they are developing. So they develop the skills that the agile coaches work with industries in every day to build. But we build it while their brains are already flexible and so they adapt to this kind of mindset so we get stronger problem solvers in the future. So what does a day in an agile educational environment look like? So what we want you to do before we show you pictures of what it looked like for us when we did that, we want you to think about the skills that you do every day at your job in your workplace. How do you think you could implement those if you were in an agile classroom when you were in school? What things need to be different? Is it just the furniture? Is it just the physical aspects of it? Is it the mindset? How does it look? Is everybody sitting in the same type of seating? Is there open seating? Are there different levels of seating? Are the students that you aid in the classroom, are you able to pick and choose your work or do you go by a certain standardized kind of curriculum format? Are you problem solving and then you choose the content that you need to study based on that? Or are you just studying content and then you have it all in your head and consider the mental roller decks if a certain problem comes up? What is the more effective use of what would have been the more effective use of your time if you were caught in an educational concept or contact when agility was applied? That's what we want you to think about. And we're gonna show you a couple of things. So what we're going to show you next is how we brought agile into our classrooms. And so just a little bit of our origin story. So we have been teachers for about 15 years. I teach social studies and history, Rosalind teaches science. And when the pandemic hit and our kids went into remote learning we had to adapt quickly and we quickly found that our kids were disengaged and sad. And so we had to find ways to bring our teams together. And so in that we started researching how do remote teams work? How do other businesses and other industries work? And so that's how we found agile. So we started bringing these ideas of Kanban and Scrum and Burndown charts. And these kinds of ways that you take your tasks, your epics, you break them down into tasks, you break down into user stories and we started to pull them across Kanban boards. And amazingly, this happened incredibly quickly with our students. So you can see here, these are several examples of several different projects. The students had to color code their projects, break them down into pieces and into tasks, pull them across the board on different style Kanban boards we tried a couple. In all honesty, it took our kids maybe a week the first time that we introduced a Kanban board. By the end of the year, they were planning out entire six week projects in about an hour. So these skills, because they're students and because they're young, there's no wall up against trying new things. So they will jump in and they will try these new things. And before you know it, you have a group full of middle school and high school students that are running their own Kanban boards, having stand up meetings at the beginning of every class, deciding the work that they're going to pull and then pulling it across the boards themselves without a lot of prompting from educators. So they are completely self-learning with the educators there for support. In this example, we had students look at social contract theory. So the work of La Cops and Rousseau, the 16th century philosophers, and we asked them, how should power be distributed in a just society? This is an example of a group that took the idea of John Locke in his writing of two treaties of government and they transformed it into an app where the American people could better get their point across to their representatives in Congress. So if you want power to be distributed, you need to tell the people in power how you want them to act on their behalf. And so they prototyped an entire app based on the idea that Congress needed to better communicate with their constituents. This is an example of one of 30 different labs that my students created from a unit on rocks and minerals. So the overall question that they had to break down was how can we use rocks and minerals or how are rocks and minerals used in the real world? General question, not a lot of substance to it, but that was the point to allow them to see all of the different ways and then be able to present and create their own lab to show the different ways that we use rocks and minerals. Not just, oh, you see it on the ground and it's pretty. It's something beyond, oh, this is a beautiful piece of jewelry and I have a gun, all right? So going beyond that for each one of the classes, each group had to make sure that they created a lesson that taught us the basics of rocks and minerals. They had to come up with their own assessment to make sure that what they taught the students so they got it. And also they had to come up with some kind of hands-on activity to make sure that we understood what was taught. So in this example, two of my students had us create our own kind of day spa where we did exfoliation with, we created our own kind of scrub. And so they had different essential oils that you could make. We used the Epsom salt. And so each one of the students was able to create their own version of that scrub to take home, they use and they actually were able to truly feel the effects of that. Now doing that versus a lab that I created, the difference in their empowerment, sharing that with their students and actually being able to go home and then educate either their parents, their family, their siblings, other family members, that is something that's not lost. That's the effect that you're trying to create with each one of the assignments that you do. So in this example, our students were studying our American Revolution. So we wanted them to learn about the timeline, how things happened. But instead of pushing that information towards them, we gave them the option of building a timeline. They had to build visuals. They had all different jobs with us. And each one of them, as you can see down the wall, got to create their own area and their own space. And they were able to choose the events that they felt had the biggest cause and effect in the revolution. And then they had to write about it. They had to create about it. They had to take a visual about it. So it was taking this kind of boring piece of history that you could easily just lecture at and you can create a PowerPoint and you could just get through it in a class period and say, this was important, this was important, this was important, this was important. Instead, the students had to pull through the history themselves, figure out what was important, figure out what was the turning points, the effects that they had. Take that information, break it down. How is it can be... Uh-oh, I think we lost Jessica for a second. Yeah, we lost her. Can you continue? So, of course, of course. So what they were doing with their timeline was, oh, Jessica, you're back. Jessica, can we hear you? Can you hear me? Yes, good, okay. Sorry. So I was just saying, they're learning all of these different complexities around, so they're learning design, they're learning prioritization, they're learning how to pull their work, they're learning collaboration, they're learning how to take information and make it into visual, since the majority of our world is moving into visual thinking. So they're learning just beyond what could be a PowerPoint to figure out all of these complexities of the work themselves, which will bring them to be better critical thinkers and problem solvers. And they're highly engaged. In this one, they had to learn about the American Bill of Rights. And so instead of just, again, reading the list of the Bill of Rights and saying, okay, these are your rights, they had to go through and ask questions, three to four questions about each one of the rights and how it impacts their life and how it changed from the historic rate to the current rate. And in that, they had to plan their own research. So you can see here, the walls are filled with questions and as the questions come, more questions come because they see another question, say, oh. Uh-oh, we lost her again. So this is something based on what we like to use with question formulation technique because when you see a question, especially an open-ended one, it leads to additional questions and it leads to deeper critical thinking skills and how those things are applied. I'm sorry, Jessica, go ahead. I was just pulling in because we lost you again. I apologize to everyone in India. There's a hurricane coming. So my internet's a little spotty. I'm in the middle of storms. So again, it creates that critical thinking. It's not just accepting knowledge that's knowledge but asking questions about it and being able to pull into it and then being able to investigate the kind of work that's interesting to you and apply it to modern day and history. So you're bridging that gap of the purpose of education is knowing your rights and how they work for you today, not just how they worked for you before. In this example, we taught the US Constitution. And again, instead of just reading a document made in 1787, the students had to look at systems thinking. So how do the systems of government work together to get things done? And instead of just trying to think about that, that's very hard, it's complex, it's very abstract. They built games around it. So they had to actually see the systems and then work within the systems to make them work together to design their own games. All of the games that were created, there was 48 games created were 100% original. Not based on others and they were able to be played in the classroom by all students and teachers. So they really took the idea of systems thinking and brought it into something physical to understand a document that's over 240 years old. And just to add to this, I apologize, there's not a picture of this in our presentation, but gamification, as a lot of you know, is applicable everywhere. We even applied it in my classroom where the students were challenged to gamify the weather. So using board games that they were already familiar with, different matching games, monopoly, shoots and ladders, all of that, they were able to come up with their own games based on what they learned about the characteristics of weather, what can cause different types of storms, what can cause different types of fronts, and then even different kind of scenarios that you or protection that you need to have depending on the type of storm or the area that you are in. So anything from a heat wave to a blizzard, the students were able to put themselves in situations through the game to make sure that themselves and their classmates understood all those different characteristics of the causes and effects of weather. The gamification is a type of assessment tool that you can use in any subject and bottom line, it's just fun and it teaches them critical thinking and collaboration on a whole new level and just reading from the textbook and giving them facts. So we have told you from what we've seen from our perspective or what we see from the educators perspective is the growth of our students as a whole student, not just as a person that's taking in information but they're growing in their independence, they're growing in their collaboration, they're growing in their communication and their active listening skills, but these are the words that we have from our students. So as you can see, we're talking about key words like communicating, creativity, leadership, collaboration, problem solving, resourcefulness. They are learning how to fix their own problems. So this is really teaching our children how to be independent grownups that can solve complex problems instead of just being individuals that are vessels that are taking in information. And all of this is achieved through bringing the agile mindset that we all use at work every day into the classroom and starting this process much earlier in kindergarten instead of waiting until we're adults and then trying to reprogram our brains to be flexible and to be critical and to be collaborative. Something that is offered through our team of coaches that with our organization, Leap.org is we are able to give students credentialing while they're in school. So this avoids that pitfall that a lot of us have fallen into of student loans and being in major debt when you go into school, you can actually learn job-ready skills while you are in school, while you were learning that content. It's blockchain protected, so it follows you everywhere you go. These are things that you can put on your resume. These are things that go with you beyond the classroom and prepare you for real life. And so that is an additional benefit besides learning the content and learning the skills. This is literally like a badge of honor that you wear and then it helps you achieve those different internships, achieve those partnerships, those apprenticeships and job as you go, because the thing that employers are paying billions of dollars each year to teach their employees, these students are learning while they're in school. And just to add on to that, when we talk about degrees, you get a degree and somebody might ask for your transcript and you got an A in science, but what does that mean that you have? In terms of these blockchain micro-credentials, we can say that you have earned a practitioner badge in Kanban. You have earned a practitioner badge in graphic design. And so that you can take these badges and put them on your resume and it shows that you have specialized in an area and we can accomplish this all through K to 12 schools so students can get out at 18 and start their lives. They can start working in jobs that pay a decent rate of money because they have these skills that they've been practicing for 12 years instead of practicing how to sit at a desk for 12 years and then having to go through a whole L and D cycle once they're hired in the real world. So it really takes that time and makes it purposeful. We're growing agile children so that they are ready to start in the world as soon as they reach adulthood. So when we're working to spread the word, there are different ways that we are trying to spread the word about the benefits of agility in every different facet of our lives. Definitely what we're talking about now is learning flow and being able to teach that to students and other teachers to teach it to their students. We offer it where you can combine all of the things that we offer, the improvement Kata Kanban with your family, curriculum development, coaching that we offer for those teachers who want long-term intensive, not just the traditional professional development that a lot of us educators go through where it's a weekend or it's a couple of days and okay, here you go and do your thing. It's a long-term coaching to make sure when you reach those pitfalls, when you have those questions, just like if you're on an agile team and product development, you don't leave until the work is done. So we wanna make sure that we are helping those teachers through those different kind of iterations of that lesson plan, the different iterations of how you go through and plan and revise and fail and do better and revise and reflect and do those things with your students. We do that every step of the way. So these are just some of the ways that we are working to make sure that we're spreading that word on an individual basis as well as personal basis with your family as well as in education to try to pose all of those gaps so that you can see the benefits of an agile type of mindset and framework and using it so it can add value in every aspect of your lives. So if you won't, I hope you have questions, but if not, if you wanna come back to us and ask more questions, this is our contact information on LinkedIn, our website and you can also email us at this information. So feel free to get a screenshot and then we have the QR code there so you can actually review this presentation again for yourself and then contact us further if you have more questions that we're not sharing today. So that QR code right down there is for our YouTube page and we are about to launch a live YouTube series every other Wednesday when we're going to talk about pressure points in education and how agile can help ease those pressure points and really transform education around the world. So please check in with our YouTube page or if you're following us on LinkedIn, you can see the live link and participate yourself. We'd love to hear voices, especially international voices and especially voices grounded in agile. And then I believe on the next slide, Roz, we have, if you'd like to share this presentation with anyone you know, teachers, parents, kids themselves, kids that are old enough, you know, middle school, high school that can advocate for themselves, please share this and let the people around you know that there's ways to solve problems in education without having to tear down education. We don't need to tear it all down. We need grassroots building it up. We need interested parents, interested students, interested teachers that want to bring the basics of agility into the classroom and help make education purpose fall again. And with that, thank you very much for listening. We hope to hear from you. So if you have questions, if you have insight, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks, Jessica. Thanks, Rosalind. We really appreciate you being welcomed into Agile India. So for everyone that's here, thank you and thank you for joining us this evening. It's so nice to speak internationally to a broader audience. Thank you. Thank you, Jessica. Thanks. Thank you, Roz. Thanks for your time.