 meditation bells. Oh, hi everybody, welcome! I'm glad you're here. I just heard the meditation bell and woke up. It feels good. So we're gonna do teaching, agile, or anything else. This is applicable to anything you want to help people learn. So it sticks. So, I don't know, does so it sticks make sense? Is that colloquially American? It means so it really works. So the learning stays with people. So they can put it into practice and be as successful as we want them to be. That's me. I'm Richard Kasparowski. You've got a lot of contact info there for me. So you can keep in touch with me afterward. We can talk during the session, but it's kind of a short session. So we're gonna go really fast. We can do questions and answers as we go. We can do a lot more afterward and we can do even more for email or whatever else. Lately, I'm chief technical officer of a health tech startup called Thrivevolution. We help people with mental health. Just this morning, my co-founder and CEO was named one of the top 100 women in cloud computing. That's pretty cool. I will pass that on to her. We want this to be true by the end of this 45 minutes or at least more true than it might be right now. That by the end of this 45 minutes, you will be able to say whatever that says, I can design and share a new learning experience with future experts. That's a really intentional way of saying I can teach a class to students or future experts, a learning experience. We're gonna use this tool called the course creation canvas. It's an electronic tool and it's an on paper tool. Many of you have the paper version of this on the table in front of you. You might be sharing with a friend. That would be good because we're gonna do sharing with a friend activities as we go anyway. So it's gonna work out really well. If you don't have your own canvas, this will work perfectly. This is all you need. There's nothing magical about this canvas. This is what it might look like when it's done. We totally filled in. You will have the outline of a learning experience that you can share with future experts. Our first topic is something called essential material. We're gonna do a lot of different kinds of interaction. One of the kinds of interaction will be digital. Do I have my digital interaction device? Yeah. Do you have a digital interaction device? They were giving away a digital interaction device. Did you get yours in the conference bag? No, you probably brought your own so they didn't have to give you one. Does yours have a web browser? Does your web browser have a camera on it? You could aim your web browser camera at that QR code or type menti.com. Does that QR code work if it's a rectangle instead of a square? I don't know. Maybe it works. Okay. When you get there, let us all know you're there. Tap one of those icons. I asked yesterday what those icons are. I think one is a heart. I think one is a thumb up, and I don't know what the other one is. Maybe it's a cat. Maybe it's a devil. Maybe it's that, which is actually sort of like a devil. This wards off the evil eye, if anybody didn't know that. Any evil eyes around this wards it off. That's a true story. I read this, so it must be true. I think I read it in Wikipedia, so it must be true. Ronnie James Dio, the American heavy metal singer, invented this because his mom used to, his grandma used to do this, and he did it on stage to salute the fans and to protect them from the evil eye. Oh, so here's a question for you. And if you didn't get there already, you can type mentee.com in those numbers, 5487226. Hey, if you were going to teach one thing about agile to somebody, what is the one most important thing that somebody needs to know about agile? One most important thing. If you could only teach somebody one thing, what is that one thing? Share your thoughts with us. This is a very advanced group at this conference. It's all about the mindset, right? You're going to teach people the mindset. That is the one most important thing. Change is pretty important. Trust is pretty important. Collaboration is pretty important. Outcomes, common sense, flexibility, retrospective matrix. We all have a different idea of what the one most important thing is, and that's okay. Whatever it is for you to teach to your learners, one thing about agile is adapting. For your learners, whatever you think is the one right thing, it's probably the one right thing. You might even ask your learners, and they'll tell you what we're doing right here. So this might be your one essential topic. If you can only teach one thing, this is the one essential topic. This is what we mean by essential material. We have a limited amount of time. I have a limited amount of time right now. You have a limited amount of time with your learners. Their boss and their boss's boss doesn't want them to waste any time in training. It's actually totally waste. It's 100% waste if they spend time in training. So think about the minimum set of things that you might want them to learn. That's the essential material. Sometimes one of my collaborators, so we put this together, three of us, Ali Reza, Lisa and me, we're all teachers, as well as professional trainers. One of the things I do is I teach agile at Harvard University back home in Boston. We came up with this idea of the minimal viable thing to teach, like a minimal viable product. It would be a minimal viable learning product or thing to teach. Maybe it's mindset. Maybe it's one of those other things. Time is a limited resource. Don't waste anybody's time and do exactly the right exercises to help people transfer that stuff in their head into stuff that's sort of like in their hearts that they just do automatically. Even if you're doing a semester long course, I teach a semester long course. It turns out a semester long course is only about 30 to 35 hours long. That's not even a full work week. You can't teach a lot in a semester, it turns out. It's not that much time. On the left, this is Ali Reza's list of the essential material in a semester long course. On the right, it's my list of the essential material in a semester long course. Different people can have different opinions about this and it's okay. We tune it and we adapt to our people. Here's an example of what might be an essential topic. Or it might be a one hour learning session in a many hours course. On my example, we've got user stories as an essential topic. For some of my people, that's the most important thing to learn. What might it be for you? Work together in pairs or small groups at your table. This is why you don't each need your own course creation canvas. With you and a friend, somebody sitting right next to you, what is your most important topic and write it down in the top left box on your canvas? Definitely do this with a friend. It will be better. We'll do this for just two minutes. We're going to go fast. And this is this is kind of like an introduction to the canvas. We can go back and do all the details later on after today's session. And this two minute intro agree with each other on your most important topic and write it down. Alright, we're going to move on to the next box on the canvas. Whatever you put together is the right answer. I guarantee it. Next thing we're going to think about is can do statements. What do you want your learners to be able to say they can do by the end of the training, by the end of the learning? What abilities do you want them to have? Not just be able to say they can do it, but really they can do it. Right? So in that example of user stories, that might be I can write a useful and usable user story. Or it might be for a different topic, I can facilitate a sprint planning session. There might be something wrong with my glasses. I can't read that from here. For my semester long course at Harvard on Agile, we've got 30 can do statements. There's about 30 hours of class time. I'll share this list with you later. But it's a bunch of can do statements. I can explain Agile to a friend. I can write useful user stories. I can do unit test driven development. I can do continuous delivery systems. And this shows the progress from left to right through the semester beginning of the semester. Most people can't do this stuff. End of the semester, it's all green. People can do this stuff at the end of the semester. So it works. For my example, user stories. Three can do statements. By the end of the learning session, I can tell a friend why user stories are important. I can elaborate a requirement as a well articulated user story. I can decompose a large user story into many small user stories. Three important things that we want people to say they can do. To actually be able to do. Not just say, but they actually can do these things. What about you and your friend? For your essential topic, what are some can do statements? What do you want people to be able to do? To be able to say they can do by the end of your learning module for your essential topic. Two minutes to talk with your friend and write down three can do statements for your topic. Go ahead. So we'll get back together. Two minutes isn't a whole lot of time. You'd probably want to spend more than two minutes on this. Don't worry. You will have time after this session to go back to it. Here's a hack. If it's something internal like I can understand user stories, try to make it something externally observable. Like I can tell a friend all about user stories. That's something that you could observe somebody doing. It's a behavior more than an internal thing. And we're going to go from here. Now that we've got some ideas about what we're going to help people learn, let's turn that into a way to help them learn it. A question for you. Coming right up. Have you done this before? Do you create learning experiences? Do you create training sessions? Do you create courses or course segments? What's your experience level with this? Back to your digital interaction device. What's your experience level on a scale from I have never done this to this is all I do all the time. There's a wide range of experience levels here in this room. That's interesting. You had a wide range of experience levels and something you were trying to teach. What would that do to you? How would that change the way you're teaching? So there is a wide range of experience in the room. Our median is pretty much right in the middle. That's good to know. A lot of the rest of this, many of you are not in your heads because you knew this was coming. There's from this book about training from the back of the room. Back of the room is back here. You actually don't need me anymore. You can do the rest of this on your own. So this is a modified kind of training from the back of the room. It's all the same things. Oh, look, on the course creation canvas, there's a bunch of things that start with the letter C. So we're going to do a bunch more of this right now. Connection activity helps engage our learners. It activates any knowledge that they might already have. It helps you as a teacher, a learning facilitator understand where they are so you can help them from where they are. We might have just done a connection activity to gauge our current level of understanding of creating course material. Here are some examples. Write down all the facts you know about Scrum Master. People know something about it, even if it's just I know how to spell it. Well, now I know how to spell it because there it is. So I can write it down. Line up by experience level. We could do this right now. And then we would know who are the experienced course creators that we could ask for help from. And who are the last experienced course creators that we would like to help more so they could help each other. We might ask a question like, Hey, what do you think is the most essential Agile topic that might have been a connection activity? Connection activities for the user story example. I ask people to tell a story. And there's three roles. There's a storyteller, there's a listener, and there's an observer. And we debrief and we, we notice that there's a storytelling template, totally unrelated to Agile stories. They go like once upon a time, and there's a protagonist that we want to succeed. And there's some, some enemy in the middle and something happens and they all live happily ever after. Fill in the blanks and you have a story. Maybe you've heard of story templates. We might get there when we talk about the concepts. For your essential topic and for your can do statements. What is a connection activity that you could use to get the learners to connect with each other socially, to connect with whatever latent knowledge they have, and for you to connect with them as a teacher and understand where they are at. For two minutes with your partner, write down a connection activity. Go for it. All right, let's gather back together. We're going to move on. Again, two minutes, not enough time. But don't worry, there is more time left in the world. From there, we've done so many things now. How are we going to, what is the stuff that we want them to know? I call it content. What is the stuff that we want them to know? Like for user stories, there is some, there's definitely some things that I want them to know about estimating. There are things I want them to know about test driven development. There are specific things I want people to know. It's a short explanation. I've already talked for too long. You're bored. I know. This is how our brains work. It might be show video. It might demonstrate. It might be I demonstrate something. It might be here, read this. Oh, I'm actually doing this right now. I'm sharing with you content. So here's another example. Now, for my user story example, there are specific things that I want people to know. I'm going to tell them about storytelling as something humans do. I'm going to tell them that user stories are about problem statements, not solutions. I'm going to tell them about this stuff called user stories, and there's a template. I'm going to tell them about the three C's and invest. I'm going to tell them a bunch of things. I'm going to try to keep it brief. For your essential topic, you know what we're going to do now, right? You're going to do this with your friends. For your essential topic, for your can-do statements, just after your connection activity, what is the stuff that you want your learners to know? Write down that list. Talk with your friend and write down that list. What is the outline of the things that you want them to know? Go ahead. We'll do it for two more minutes. All right, moving on again. I don't know how much time is left. I mean, I know there's 15 minutes left in this session, but I don't know how much time is left. So you can go back to this canvas with all of that time that's left and fill it in together and go deeper and create a real course. Meanwhile, we're going to go on to the fifth of six boxes. The fifth box is about, oh, you just tried it. Yeah, that was good. Now, concrete practice. This is the part where we take the stuff that we taught them and they're going to forget it next week if they didn't forget it already, but we're going to build it into them. We're going to turn it into a habit that they can't forget. We're going to build it into their hearts. This is going to be part of them now. So how do we take these words that we just gave them and make it who they are? That's what concrete practice is about. People learn by doing, not by listening. My son is a martial arts teacher. He's an expert at this. They learn by doing. You don't become good at martial arts by listening to somebody tell you about martial arts. You get good at it by doing it. You get good at writing user stories by writing user stories. You get good at pair programming by pair programming. So how could you take whatever your topic was and have them practice it? The first half of can do is we tell them some stuff. This is the second half of can do. They really will be able to do it now. Some examples. Maybe you're teaching them about team formation. Let's charter a new team. Maybe you're teaching them about user stories. Let's write some user stories. Maybe you're teaching... Let's write acceptance criteria. That would be part of user stories. Maybe you have them do some sort of capstone project to build a real product using Scrum right now in half a day. Yeah. For the user stories example, we'll do an activity. We'll elaborate real user stories in small groups. Somebody over here had a really good example of it. Make believe you're planning a wedding. What are all the user stories for a wedding? That would be cool. Along with all the acceptance criteria for each happy ending for each little part of the wedding. I might know somebody who made a Kanban board for his wedding. I might have kind of kept it private because people thought that was weird. But it helped me. It worked. So for you and your friends for your essential topic, for those can do statements following on that connection activity with that content that you just gave them. What is the concrete practice? What thing will they do right now to practice the skill that you want them to learn? To get to the second half of I really can do it. With your friend two more minutes, what is the concrete activity? What is the concrete practice? And be very specific about it. Exactly what will they do? Go ahead. Let's move on to the sixth and final box. The moment you've all been waiting for. The conclusion. So we're going to wrap it all up. We're going to bring it together. We're going to help people synthesize everything they just heard and practiced. We're going to help them integrate all of this new knowledge that they have. Some examples. Just questions you could ask to wrap things up. What's the most important thing you just heard? Or what's the most interesting thing you just learned? And people will pause and reflect. It will help make a mark in their brains. They'll make it easier for them to go back to, like an index. This will be easier for them to go back to user stories or whatever the essential topic is. How did it feel to you? Did anything surprise you? More markers that will go into their brains. How could you use this in your real everyday work? And now it's a really concrete thing that they might actually practice again tomorrow. For my user story example, this is my default conclusion activity. I just asked what was your key takeaway? It works. People stop and pause and reflect and they remember something. Oh, and they start teaching it back to each other, which is really cool. And then they know it even better. So for you and your friend, for your essential topic, this can-do statements, that connection activity, that content you taught them. They just did some concrete practice. How are they going to conclude? How are you going to help them conclude their learning and synthesize everything together? Maybe just ask a question. Maybe have them teach something back quickly. Two minutes together, what's your conclusion activity for your topic? All right. And you will undoubtedly want to come back to the canvas and think things over and fill it in with more detail. And that's wonderful. You will do that. Meanwhile, oh, now you've created this beautiful class that you want to teach. How about going and teaching it? How about helping people learn this stuff now that you've designed it? Have you ever done this? Or have you ever been in a class? What was the best class you've ever been in? The best learning experience you've participated in. What were some characteristics of that class, that training session? The best training session you've ever been in. What's one word that describes it? I've never not turned around and watched what you type in. I want to be surprised. The best training that we've ever been involved in. It was interactive. It was engaging. It was fun. It was an eye-opener. It was thoughtful and engaged. You were awestruck. It was experiential. We all know what the best training looks like. We've all experienced some really great training sessions, some learning experiences. So we all know what to do. Copy the best ones that we've ever been part of. It's that easy. There's a few things to think about to make it work really well and you've all experienced these things. There's a few things that come in mind to me. The room layout. This is a pretty good room layout. Oh, look. We're all sitting at round tables, kind of close to each other in right-sized learning teams. This is a pretty good layout here. I wonder if this was intentional. You might do slides or you might have stuff on flip charts. There might be some sort of tactile experience, like a canvas or something and pencils that you could touch or maybe some fun toys. People might be standing up and moving around. I might have asked you to find a friend over there in another part of the room and at least you would have gotten some exercise. There might be food. Food helps a lot. Oh, but what if you're trending online? That would be a lot different. Why don't it? Or not. Maybe instead of flip charts, you would do some hand-run notes on an electronic tablet. Otherwise, it's all the same stuff. You can still get people to stand up and move around. You can still encourage people to get food. It's all the same. Okay, so how much time is left? Yeah, for the next 75 minutes, you're going to practice teaching your class. That's not going to work. Don't worry. My wife tells me that if you have to say, if you have to explain a joke, then it wasn't actually a joke. Okay, so, hey, how will you use this in your real everyday work? Stuff we talked about here for the last 45 minutes. What will you do with this now? Here are some options. You could go back to your digital interaction device. What might you do now? What's your next step, like maybe starting tomorrow or maybe starting Monday? So maybe you'll try this. You'll create a new learning experience. Maybe you'll improve an existing course that you already have. Maybe you'll incorporate this four Cs idea, or actually on this canvas it's six Cs, into your training sessions. Maybe you'll carefully design the space. Maybe you'll practice one of these sessions with a small group of learners, sort of like a beta test before you do it with a big group. Maybe you'll do all of these things. That's probably a good idea. These are all good ideas. Maybe it's something else. If it's something else, let me know after work. So this was our goal. Oh, did you notice we just did a conclusion activity? You're so smart. Oh, did you notice we started with a can do statement? You're so smart. We wanted this to be true or closer to true by the end of the 45 minutes. My hope is that this is closer to the truth than it was 45 minutes ago. I'm really hopeful that this worked for you. Let's see. Oh, if you're interested in spending more time with me, if you want to spend early summer in Boston, it's really, really fun. You could come join me in the three week long summer semester at Harvard. It's open enrollment. Anybody can come take the class. We're going to do everything about Agile, including delivering real products in three weeks. Come join us. It's fun. Oh, if you go to my website, you know, for the previous two days, we've been doing things related to teams and team building. You might have heard something about teams and team building if you were in this room before my session right now. I've got a really quick, easy psychological safety assessment on my website. It's drawn from some of the scientific literature. Try it out if you think it might help you in your teams. This is the part where I pause for an undetermined amount of time while people aim their cameras at the screen. There's no pressure. Don't worry. If you didn't get the QR code, you can go to my website and it'll be really obvious where to find it. Oh, one more activity. I love feedback. I've heard that in situations that people call agile, there might be feedback involved and iterative improvements. Will you help me? I'd love some feedback so I can make iterative improvements. You could go back to your digital interaction advice and answer three easy questions. Give this session a score from one to ten. Tell me what was good about it so I can do more of that. And tell me what else it would take to make this the perfect session. I'll give you a moment to try that out. And while you're doing that, I'll say thank you. And there's my contact info again. You can keep in touch with me here at the conference. Later on after the conference, we have all the time. So this is going to work out. Thank you all for being here this afternoon. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Bye.