Education Toolkit

Romeo and Juliet for Agile Learning

This mind map builds upon publicly available lesson plans for teaching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and reimagines them as Agile Development and Scrum exercises, two concepts borrowed from application development and business. It offers a view of what a completed set of Agile Learning sprints might look when teaching the play.

The learning journey

The paper “Mind Mapping for Agile Learning” explores this mind map in detail. At a high level, the mind map offers a list of requirements. It translates standards into user stories, a representation of requirements, and provides a list of prototypical sprints, i.e., student learning activities with goals.

A new iteration of this learning journey may start out with only the user stories and the product/learning goals. Students would then take the initiative to slice off chunks of learning to tackle, creating new versions of the sprints. The sprints in the mind map reflect how an archetypal group of students might approach this work.

It is important to note that the source lesson plan was very ambitious. Therefore, the sprints represented here offer an intense approach to learning Romeo and Juliet, Elizabethan history, Shakespeare’s biography, literary terms, a Shakespeare word invention dictionary, and other elements. Of course, any of these learning objectives can be eliminated from the requirements, as can direct learning about some aspect of the play, like the Queen Mab speech, that may not be appropriate for younger students.

Mind mapping and agile learning

This mind map represents a prototype of an Agile Learning experience—the mind map should be considered a template, a model, a learning tool. Chances are if you adopt this approach to learning, the first few passes may feel a bit overwhelming and generate uncertainty, even anxiety—not unlike students entering a new learning experience. However, over time, if you adopt a co-creation model, students start taking on more responsibility for how they learn and their approach to delivering proof of knowledge. In addition, co-created learning experiences allow teachers to focus on secondary objectives like engaging learners with even more challenging requirements.