Collaborative structure & Agile format

I had a quandary at moonCat for a while about projects. Working with people, but allowing for structure & creativity equally, was difficult without having someone in charge & telling others what to do.  How to provide structure & learning without being so structured there is no room for creativity? Also, there's that whole moving away from hierarchy thing . . . empowering others

When Phoenix & I were working & playing at The Farm School Solar Campus in Tennessee we co-taught a class on technology, and I taught a few other classes.  I loved how the staff worked flexibly with each other to provide an empowered educational experience. It is clearly something Peter Kindfield (the principal) has  lot of experience with. 

It was at The Farm School that I was introduced to agile learning.  On Fridays we experimented with agile fridays, using a white board and columns of possible, ready, doing, & done. I loved how this kept everyone engaged and seemed to level the playing field of students & teacher into one collaborative group. 

Our work days at moonCat have been so much more relaxed & successful since I learned this approach to organizing a group. I also feel that using the agile framework, I have more of a chance to pull in the skills of others, rather than just standing at the front, teaching, and supervising. 

I watched a TED talk by Bruce Feiler a while back on pulling the agile framework in to the family. I decided to try it. 

This is Phoenix', my 8-year-old's agile board from today. It is fun to see how she uses it and changes the format creating her own codes.  I asked her to start keeping track of time so we can look back at the end of the day and talk about what she has done. 

I would really rather she not sit around playing games all day, but I have made a compromise to allow a lot of game time in exchange for her being motivated to keep her eye patch on for her lazy eye exercises.  Now I can dig in to finish my tiling project on the bathroom/kitchen floor (losing myself, as I always do in my building projects) and still know what is going on. She feels empowered & we have a way of evaluating if her needs are getting met while I'm instilling values other than "do your thing & I will do mine".

Happier Phoenix, happier mom, happier dad. Working together. whew