Adopting an agile mindset in the classroom means trusting teams to organize and complete work in rapid iterations. To truly implement this framework students need to select their own groups to develop their projects. For real learning to occur there must be student agency, and this is the first step. 

Having students, led by team captains, self-select their team is one of the tenets of eduScrum. It is essential that students understand their power of choice. This is not the class they’ve taken every year with a new teacher and slightly bigger tables. Student agency is paramount to the success of the year.

This task is not to be taken lightly. If we let students pick who they want to work with we all know they will pick their friends and nothing will get accomplished.

We have worked up to this point laying the groundwork for how to pick groups and the students don’t even know it yet.  We began the school year by learning about Gardner’s multiple intelligences and exploring how all humans learn differently. The evidence was in the activities and group discussions that followed taking their “quizzes.”  Students now clearly understand that they each function in…