As simple as the summer holidays: how to teach Kanban and other workplace techniques to 10 year olds
In the second part of this series, Carol Johnson, IT Director at The Telegraph, describes how she took a work methodology from carmakers in 1940s Japan, to London pupils in 2017.
I’m standing at the front of the classroom, facing 26 excited children looking at me rather expectedly. After a brief intro I ask them: “Who knows what job they want when they leave school?” Thankfully, I see several hands go up. I then ask how many are in technology? Some hands go down. As I look around the room, I notice that none of the girls’ hands stay up. Sad but not surprising. There are 14 volunteers from The Telegraph in the room, who introduce themselves one by one, all explaining their roles. Each of them is met with either an “ooh” or an “ahhh”, with the exception of Howard Elston. When he introduces himself as the person who works with Alexa and YouTube, he was met with shrieks and the open-mouthed, goggle-eyed excitement of children opening the all-they-ever-wanted Christmas present. What a moment of pure joy.
I explain the details of the project to Class 6A, who are going to produce their own digital product, using podcasts and articles built on their own website. By now, they realise that they’ve been specially chosen and the atmosphere is electric.
Whilst this all sounds rather simplistic, the approach we decided to take was to mirror the real world of a media organisation, with roles, tools, skills and approaches that we would use to create our own digital products as much as possible. We would be introducing the children to Agile, Kanban, MVPs, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Sound Engineers and a whole host more.
The first task was to identify the “job” that each child would have, based on their traits rather than the skills they had. After all, they probably wouldn’t have the necessary skills yet. Our original aim was to use a team-building activity to identify the various roles for each child. We soon realised that we needed to take a slightly different approach due to the limited amount of time we had. Had we bitten off more than we could chew already?
We devised a behaviours matrix and asked the teacher to assess each child against the matrix for a role and a team, in advance of the first lesson. The plan was for 3 teams; the content team to create articles and podcasts; the podcast booth team who would design and build the booth; and finally the web team who would learn to code to build a website. Each team contained various roles to meet the needs of the project.
In the first lesson we ran a team-building exercise appropriate to each team. The content team were given phrases to build a story. Some phrases were grammatically incorrect or contained spelling mistakes. Each phrase needed to be in the final story. The other two teams were given marshmallows and spaghetti in which to create the largest structure.
The aim of these exercises was to firstly see whether the roles they’d unknowingly been given by the teacher were a good match. Secondly, it was to look at the dynamics of the team, just as you would in the workplace.
At first the children were a bit unsure, each a bit nervous to take the first action. It soon became clear who were the natural leaders as they were starting to direct the others. Slowly but surely, each child started to take steps in their task. I remembered at the project kick-off being asked, by some of the Telegraphers “how do we talk to the children” or “what if they play up”? It was going to be interesting to see how the Telegrapher’s would respond or react. Just like the children, their natural tendencies came into play and they took to teaching like ducks to water.
During the task we assessed each child and then reviewed our findings with the class teacher. Thankfully, most of the roles matched with her assessment. What a relief that was. Now we knew we were on the mark.
All of the children in their groups were each given their roles, a job description and key objectives. To end the lesson, each project manager in the group fed back to the rest of the class a summary of what they did. The children were already super-excited about their next lesson. Each child was given homework to prepare themselves for the next task. As the children finished their class and set about going home, The Telegraphers retired to an empty classroom, shattered and somewhat bewildered. What a whirlwind that was. The enormity of what we were doing was starting to set in, as well as the size of the task ahead of us. The next week was all about planning and teaching Kanban to 10 year olds in 15 mins!
Planning is just a chore — or is it?
We all know that crossing things off your to-do list is very satisfying. But getting your child to do chores is a whole different matter. Getting 26 children to plan and deliver — hmm, now that’s a whole different ball game. How do you make planning fun, interesting and engaging. Introduce them to Kanban of course! Yeah right! Well actually, maybe we can make this fun.
Step 1. Identify with Kanban
Lots of hands go up when I ask “who knows about Toyota”, with some excitedly going on to tell me about a lot of other car manufacturers, too! I explained how in 1940, Toyota had found a new way of working. After asking if anyone knew what Kanban meant I got lots of glazed eyes — including some of the Telegraphers! The answer of course, dear reader, as you have correctly guessed, is that Kanban is Japanese for “visual sign” or “card”.
Step 2 — Make Kanban relative
The class were then asked to write 3 things on sticky notes that they must, should or could do in their summer holidays. They placed the sticky notes on the flip-chart marked ‘TO DO’, which were then grouped together. Lots of items that you would expect to see appeared, such as “go to the beach”, “stay in bed”, “eat ice cream” and “do homework/revise”. I wasn’t expecting that last one but the teacher was happy. Each child then placed a mark against the task they thought most important, which was then prioritised by the highest score.
The children could see a very long list of tasks forming and all agreed it was a lot to do. Two additional sheets were placed next to the ‘TO DO’ list, one headed ‘IN PROGRESS’ and the other headed ‘DONE’. We then simulated a project in action by moving the various tasks to ‘IN PROGRESS’ and some on to ‘DONE’. With the children, we talked through their feelings about seeing the differences between each sheet and they all agreed that seeing the ‘DONE’ list get bigger was great and that the task list didn’t seem so big after all.
Step 3 — Let’s start planning
Armed with their new-found knowledge of Kanban, each team retreated to a different classroom with their Telegraph Lead to start their own planning for their part of the project. Their own prioritised ‘TO DO’ lists were starting to take shape. It was during the content team’s planning session that we had the quote of the week. When asked what you need to produce a video or podcast, the very vocal, young project manager stated categorically “You need the 3 C’s, cameras,confidence and children”. Turns out it wasn’t a thing. Kids, don’t you just love ‘em!
Next time : Challenges, dilemmas and decisions
Carol Johnson is IT Director at The Telegraph. Follow her @JohnsonCsdo
