“Agile” Teaching Framework - An Educational System

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Short Answer

“To believe in an ideal, is to be willing to betray it. It is something no Sith or Jedi has ever truly learned.”

Kreia, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004)

Disclaimer: I built this framework in mind for secondary and tertiary education (ages 12 and above). Elementary school/primary education may need adjustments beyond what is here. It is also independent of the subject(s) taught.

I find education always involves communication in some way, shape, or form, while another significant part is management. Communication and management are tightly integrated together here.

“Communication” is packed into three instructional categories:

Lectures
Activities & Projects
Review & Tests

If you have 10 parts of time, you determine how many of those 10 parts of time are dedicated across three categories for every unit you need to cover.

That’s it. Simple and easy. You deal with dirty (or unfiltered) data and human variables. Designing instruction, and many parts of educational systems, is simply extracting the necessary information, transforming it for students to best learn the information, and load it into lesson plans for student consumption. From there, think about how you’ll manage time and students. There are countless variables involved in these aspects, if you wish to delve deep into the details, but it’s similar to the problem with optimization constraints: there is no perfect education system.

Think CAP Theorem (attributed to Eric Brewer, 2000) and ETL pipelines, for those same readers with data backgrounds.

Last, but not least: Whatever you do, even if it’s easy, a break, or a game, it must tie back into instruction. Trust me; this is for your own sanity.

Long Answer

Here’s a weird thought: Education is learning. Teaching is a form of learning.

A student may only need to look up the information to learn about something or to solve a problem. They may not need to utilize the information afterwards. You, as a teacher or non-teaching individual, may have looked up something on Google, got an answer, and (probably) didn’t need to remember that answer later on because it solved your current question/problem.

A teacher, however, goes through multiple steps beyond looking up the information. They have to ensure the information is correct, figure out what parts they need to communicate, figure out the method of communication, then deliver that communication to a broader audience, and adjust–sometimes in the moment–how a concept is presented.

Paradoxically, teachers can often be better learners than students and may learn more new things about the same topic(s) compared to their students–the very people they’re trying to educate!

This gap in learning creates a void to fill with an important question: how does a student learn if they’re not a teacher and trying to teach others?

What’s the Overview?

A popular phrase is “I do, we do, you do” and repeat. It may be an older framework, but it’s still pretty effective. In a way, I’m taking parts from this framework and translating them into actionable items. We’ll explore those reasons and more in this chapter.

The formal name is the “Gradual Release of Responsibility” in case you want more information (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983).

The curriculum you design should mirror what students will do outside the classroom as closely as possible whenever feasible.

Many topics can fit into short, fixed-time periods of 1, 2, or 4 weeks/days and include a balance of lectures, activities, projects, and tests.
Be ready and able to adjust lesson plans as needed, even on a day-by-day basis.
Every subject requires teachers to communicate well through storytelling. If you cannot communicate well and hold students’ attention, then you cannot get students to invest in your teachings and learn what they need to know.
If it works as a summary, then it might be best to keep it as a summary.
Good lectures are not boring. Bad lectures are boring.
“If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.” – Former US President Woodrow Wilson (Daniels, 1946, p. 624)

This framework requires keeping some other important things in mind:

You MUST hold students accountable.
The goal is fast feedback and results on learning material (content), while keeping any changes cheap and easy to implement to take advantage of better learning opportunities.
It also requires autonomy; if an organization does not support it, it will not work.
It is NOT meant to micromanage people.
Do not implement this framework for the sake of process or as a means to offload more work onto instructors (and risk the single point of failure problem).
You must be allowed to criticize the system(s) to find and develop improvements for it.

A Cautionary Aside on Frameworks

Keep in mind the following information in this chapter is a framework. Not a system, not a curriculum, etc.

What’s the difference? A framework provides a reference point, or a set of predefined rules and functions to work around. A system, on the other hand, is a self-contained, working entity, with its own flow, functions, and controls.

Even if it were a system instead of a framework, no single system (and framework) can satisfy all of your needs and do everything for you. In practice, you will and should expect to incorporate other tools and technologies.

I’ll put it in several analogies.

If Windows OS is a system, .NET Framework is the framework to build applications on Windows.
If a website is a system, React is a framework which helps create that system.
If all teaching materials (i.e. curriculum, classroom management plan, etc.) together form a system, this framework helps determine how to split types of learning to meet standards.
If a toolkit is a system, a set of standardized wrenches is the framework used to solve problems.

What I’m asking you to do is think in terms of problems to solve and what frameworks (tools, structures, or otherwise) to apply to solve the problem. You may see this concept called “Jobs to Be Done” in other spaces, which is figuring out the steps to complete a job, why the job is being done, and researching solutions to complete that job.

E.g. A person wants to browse the web on their phone. You use frameworks, like UI toolkits and coding libraries, to create a system, which is a web browser in this case, to do that job.

Though this advice may run counter to this chapter’s focus, it will help you in the future when you need to design your own systems from scratch or adapt curricula to an existing framework or system.

Where does Agile fit into this?

Notice: I may use the terms “distribution” and “ratio” interchangeably.

For those unfamiliar with Agile, here’s the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001).

It’s related to software development, but you can apply it in multiple industries. In practice, though, Agile goes through numerous types of implementation to various levels of success and failure (E.g. “Scrumfall”) compared to other practices, like Waterfall and Kanban, and its original intent, guidelines, and purpose often gets thrown to the wayside.

Despite that haphazard treatment in practice, it’s still a philosophy focused on getting many people at different places in their lives and varied skill sets to work on one common goal (e.g. getting through a curriculum in a class). That is a great description for education and the people who go through education systems.

If you were to really compress Agile down, it’s basically everyone talks to each other (students, teachers, administrators, etc.), the system strives for quality outputs, and the product is updated frequently (and hopefully easily) to account for changing conditions.

Scrum is a framework compatible with Agile (but Scrum =/= Agile) and the sprint is a part of Scrum (Rehkopf, n.d.; Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020). The goal of a sprint is to ship out work on a usable increment (i.e. a part of a project or even a complete project) at the end of each sprint. To put “product” another way, the goal is to complete parts of, or the whole, curriculum/education system by your deadline(s).

The stages of a Scrum “sprint” are the following (further reading):

Planning
Implementation
Review
Retrospective

I’ll go over these four stages and where they apply in a teaching context below. Each unit or “cycle” repeats these four stages continuously from start to end during a school year, semester, or trimester. Though you go through iterations with a sprint, it’s not ideal to go across stages in a sprint, such as moving from Implementation to Planning. It’s best to go through a whole cycle of Planning, Implementation, Review, and then Retrospective whenever possible, as the Retrospective stage is time dedicated to adjusting your approach, seeing what went wrong or right, and more.

I should also explicitly call out I cannot, in good faith, call this framework Scrum. The Scrum framework itself doesn’t actually do that much on its own and is intentionally imperfect. I am cherry-picking and implementing parts of Scrum specifically to fit education systems, so I absolutely do not expect it to work as intended outside of that. Normally the intention is to implement Scrum in its entirety, but I also have to cover how certain aspects should be done, rather than focus purely on the “what” and leave the “how” entirely up to whomever reads it.

When I was teaching, I settled on a 6/2/2 distribution/ratio for most of my curriculum. In a block of 10 “teaching” days (or two business weeks), this distribution splits into three categories:

(60%) 6 days lecture
(20%) 2 days projects and/or activities
(20%) 2 days tests and/or review

I set this up because I had, in the worst case, 24 units in a single school year to cover. Despite planning in short-term sprints, I didn’t neglect planning for the long-term either. In science, I also had much theoretical information to cover compared to practical experiments to do. I had to be sensible and efficient. With this setup, I met standards, and I regained an entire week to explore other future concepts with students in the field of science!

Some readers may see the above and wonder why I spend entire days on just one category of teaching. That was simply how I did things at the time. It’s entirely possible to mix categories together and do those 3 categories in 1 day as well.

To give an example of a mixed “lecture” day in one, 50 minute class session:

Lecture (~18-20 minutes)
Activity (~15-20 minutes)
Review (~10 minutes)

You try to define ratios for each category (e.g. “6:2:2”) and NOT finite units of time in this framework, so you can scale up and down based on how much time you’ll have to instruct.

E.g. You have 10 minutes instead of 10 days, so it splits into 6 minutes, 2 minutes, and 2 minutes.

More important notes with the above distribution:

You’ll eventually lose some instructional days. It’s possible, but difficult, to plan for losses like these, but you’ll likely only be able to decently prepare 1-2 weeks out at a time.
This distribution example is for a two-business-week (10-day) coverage of one unit. 1 week (5 days) would be 3/1/1 and 4 weeks (20 days) would be 12/4/4.
1 or 2 week periods work best for me, because you won’t go too in-depth when you should summarize instead, and you are less likely to get behind on your teaching schedule.

Some parts in each unit I can summarize and explain fully in a few sentences. Other parts required significantly more depth or required methods where typical text or verbal explanations alone were insufficient.

Pre-emptive Advisory

Be wary of disregarding a type of learning completely, like never doing lectures, never doing activities, or never doing tests. It may likely affect learning negatively and not properly convey important concepts effectively.

For example, imagine removing coloring/drawing activities from kindergarten and young children. Those activities were around for decades, if not centuries or longer, because they help build up fine motor skills. You would need an extremely good reason, with evidence, to break away from a long established precedent.

Though I do a 6/2/2 setup, other subjects may need more time dedicated to projects and activities rather than lectures, such as theater, art, athletics, and music. In those scenarios, you could do a 4/4/2, a 2/6/2, or even a 1/8/1 setup if it’s primarily project-based rather than theory-based and/or exams aren’t the primary way to check for competency.

If your curriculum is more project-based, collaborative, or heavily focuses on activities, dedicate more time to activities and working on projects. If not, dedicate more time to lecture and direct instruction. From personal preference, I’d advise to always have some time planned for reviewing and tests to ensure material is retained and sufficiently mastered.

Another thing to keep in mind is there are multiple ways to teach multiple topics.

This framework focuses on categorizing methods and distributing their ratios to fit a learning environment. It’s my attempt to make a framework one can apply across multiple environments, multiple age groups, multiple levels of education, and multiple accommodations all at once.

Some important notes before reading further:

It’s ok for students to be bored sometimes.
Treat this framework as a set of principles and a template, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. It should accommodate most systems though!
Modifications are expected and will happen in practice; plan for when they’re needed.
Sometimes old methods work better than new methods.

Artifact Overview

There’s three parts representing the work involved inside of here: product backlogs, sprint backlogs, and increments (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020).

Product backlogs are a list of how you improve a product or service and owned by a Product Owner (which can be the educator) tied to a Product Goal. A person selects and orders items doable within a single sprint (typically the 2-week limit defined earlier). It defines value, stakeholders, and direction. Refinement is continuous and ensures items are small, clear, and actionable before Sprint planning stages.

Think of the product backlog as an ordered list of what helps achieve your goals.
It is intentionally never complete as well, because refinement is always ongoing.

Sprint backlogs cover multiple things, such as the Sprint Goal, Sprint items from the product backlog, and actionale plans for increments. In other words, the why, what, and how. Every Sprint has a single Sprint Goal present in that Sprint. Designating two or more goals dilutes focus and may further risk not meeting your intended goals. If work is different than expected, or does not meet the goal, that’s when you redefine the scope and refine the sprint’s backlog to still fit the current Sprint goal.

Increments are reusable steps representing value made towards the Product Goal, are additive as you go through increments, and verified at each “step” to ensure they fit together. Multiple increments may be included in each sprint and available for stakeholders before a sprint ends (e.g. updated grades available for viewing at any time during a sprint).

The most critical part of Increments is the Definition of Done. This is a formalized description of an increment everyone involved across multiple teams to establish a defined boundary, like how people would agree on what a metric means. Without a clear definition, you risk micromanagement and poor work practices slipping in and poisoning the entire process. If an increment doesn’t meet the definition of done, it cannot be released or presented as part of a Sprint.

In this particular framework, there are some deviations. In education, students won’t be in control of the Sprint Backlog, unlike a normal Scrum implementation, but may still provide feedback and discuss the work done within a Sprint. Additionally, the educator or higher level manager, like administrators, may affect both product and sprint backlogs because they’re ultimately responsible for ensuring curriculum standards are met.

When correctly implemented, everyone will be focused towards the goal (e.g. properly learning the material/curriculum) rather than the backlog (e.g. doing assignments and work to get a grade).

Planning (Teacher)

The planning phase is what you spend the bulk of your time on and, more often than not, NOT during a class period. The majority is spent during assigned planning periods and outside of school. I also don’t include it as part of the “6/2/2” setup because it’s not days where students are heavily involved; it’s mainly just you as a teacher.

Unlike a typical Scrum sprint, the Planning phase doesn’t require the students to be present, but still accounts for the capabilities and conditions of students, such as:

Disabilities & accommodations, such as IEPs and 504s
What students can reasonably accomplish
What skill(s) students have going into the course/unit

Before starting your planning, look for a set of standards or objectives (your product backlog) you need to cover and find the appropriate materials, such as textbooks, that cover or meet those standards and objectives.

A typical planning phase for me looked something like the following for each unit:

Review the unit material. I may already know it, but confirmation exposes knowledge gaps if they exist.
Make a short list of concepts to cover.
Verify with standards if goals are met.
Verify with standards what material to test and quiz over by the end of the unit.
Research additional sources if current material does not cover all standards.
Figure out ways to summarize each concept to still meet standards, in case time is cut short due to external factors.
Establish context with previous units, so concepts can relate to and build upon previous units.
See what materials I need to bring in, if any, and assess what equipment I have currently.
- For projects and activities, the Internet is a great place to search for plans, free online labs, and ideas for hands-on learning.
“Block” out sessions by days and plan for around 5-10 minutes of “waste” or downtime during the period.
- Downtime could also be time I’m not actively teaching and having students work on something in the meantime in class.
For secondary and primary education, figure out what material students should cover and/or work on when I’m absent from school during part(s) of the unit.
Do a second pass of the unit plan and refine the presentation materials.
- Visuals, diction, summarizing information, explanations, etc.

The core idea is straightforward: review the units, review the standards related to the units, start with summaries on concepts, and expand with detail as needed.

You also want to be the teacher that actually teaches students.

While this list seems long, it takes only a few times at most to go through before it becomes easy to adapt. Later on, this took up to 1 hour for each entire unit. You also don’t need to write everything down on a lesson plan, but this may differ depending on the specific requirements and expectations of your teaching and administrators.

If you’re struggling in the planning phase, don’t worry. This part takes practice. In my situation, I eventually got each day/class down to lesson plans of 3-4 line summaries, like the following, which leaves me room to adjust and be flexible in a classroom:

Titles of Section(s)/Activity to cover that day
1 sentence on the objectives
Any other task(s) to cover if able to or if needed

Lastly, no plan you make survives first contact with students (paraphrased from Helmuth von Moltke, 1871). The planning is still useful, but prepare to deviate when needed and as situations outside of your control arise.

Implementation (Teacher & Student)

Think of “Implementation” as the time to execute your plans made earlier in a teaching environment, whether in person or through distance learning. The majority of days for each unit are further defined here too. (6 days and 2 days, or 8 days total, from my original “6/2/2” setup).

There are three “primary” teaching methods: lectures, projects and activities, and tests/review. There’s also a part called “daily scrum” where you, the teacher, can quickly reassess your progress and make minor to moderate adjustments if needed.

Lectures (in Implementation)

Lectures are the first “6” of my setup. As a reminder, you can decrease lecture days for more hands-on classes.

I’d also consider them the hardest to run, because it’s usually the student sitting and listening. Younger students are more likely to display behavior issues during these compared to older/adult students.

Lectures are like meetings. The person “calling the meeting” is the instructor and should have several things in place (with some tips taken from Smart Brevity by VandeHei et al. (2022)):

There’s an objective and an agenda.
- This can be just a few sentences. Nothing long.
Time limits are planned.
A headline to single out why people (the students typically) are there.
Ways to guide the discussion and shut down off-topic conversations.
Starting on time.
- Chit-chat is fine before time. At start time? Not fine.
Thanking only those who are there on time.
Properly assigning responsibilities.

Lectures are sessions used to deliver, typically verbally, a significant amount of information all at once to a student, or group of students, and allow them to ask questions. It’s sometimes called direct instruction too. Direct instruction requires at least some lecturing done and I find helps students and adults (pedagogy and andragogy) who aren’t as effective in a group/collaborate learning environment.

You may consider direct instruction bad, or at least heard about it’s negative aspects. I’m here to tell you the opposite. Direct instruction is effective and reinforced with studies spanning over 50 years from today (as of February 2026). As for a small sampling of these studies, please refer to the following:

Hattie Ranking (Hattie, 2018)
Just How Effective is Direct Instruction? (Mason & Otero, 2021)

A single lecture “talk” on each topic should rarely go beyond 18-20 minutes without some sort of break or it suffers from diminishing returns. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), a nonprofit focused on spreading ideas, uses a similar guideline as it’s “long enough to say something meaningful, but short enough to hold your audience’s full attention” (TED, 2025).

You can, and should, still consider longer or full duration lecture days! Just remember to pause or break appropriately throughout it.
As a caveat, this is meant for public talks or “sage on the stage” style lectures.

When I did full lecture days, I alternated lectures and review. I did a 15-20 minute topic lecture, followed by a 5 minute review, and repeated as needed. That pacing helped better with retention and overload of information. While format varies by content, and sometimes includes an activity, there’s always a break between topics to let the information sink in.

That break isn’t “free time” though. You just go from doing one thing to doing another thing.

With lectures, you need to focus on three areas alongside the material you’re teaching: passion, knowledge, and entertainment.

Passion is how much you care about what you’re teaching. If you can show you care–preferably in a genuine manner, but even an attempt is fine–then you can get students to care.

Knowledge is how much you know about the subject(s) you’re teaching. It’s entirely possible to teach by reading out the material, straight from a textbook. Still, your students may question your teaching ability if you also cannot successfully answer their questions, which leads to disengagement and less effective teaching.

Entertainment is the ability to hold attention. You don’t need to dance like a monkey in front of students, or never let students get bored, but you also shouldn’t be bland and monotone. If you’re not able to hold a student’s attention, they’ll lose that attention. They may create problems for you and other students, negatively bringing down the classroom.

Steve Jobs’ speech with the iPhone reveal, TED Talks, TikTok, social media applications, and YouTube shorts are excellent examples of how you can hold the attention of people across all ages.

The combination of these three areas, with your teaching material, culminates in storytelling; the ability to tell engaging stories (or “sell” something that students “buy” into with their attention and willingness to learn).

Though some may criticize “sage on the stage” style lectures, with valid points, they are highly effective when done well. You are not limited to only words; you can use images, drawings, occasionally get students to follow along with something while lecturing, ask them questions about what you’re teaching, and more. You can play off of student tangents relevant to your topic and have the tangent used as a question on a test, to keep students’ attention by inserting the unexpected question here and there.

Condensing the above, lectures are a combinations of a few things:

Instructor’s delivery of information to impart knowledge
Open discussion (and “controlled” conversations) to question why that knowledge is important
Ways to engage with the content through active learning beyond simply listening

Lecturing works great if the lecture is well structured. If not, then it does not work well. It is a powerful tool for learning, but it requires preparation, dedication, and proper delivery on the teacher’s part.

Activities & Projects (in Implementation)

Activities and projects are the first “2” of my setup. I recommend doing no fewer than 1 to 2 activities or projects per unit, unless your material is nearly all theoretical, as you may lose student engagement from over-repetition.

Activities and projects are ways to break the monotony of a classroom and force students to solve problems or perform work they otherwise cannot do easily in a lecture. These may be the toughest type to implement, because many things can go very wrong, very quickly.

Projects and activities may also be higher difficulty as they deal more with critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills. There may also be prerequisite knowledge required to follow along properly or else the purpose of the activity/project falls through.

If you haven’t reviewed your safety measures for activities, review them as soon as possible to ensure compliance. You can do multiple days if there are many procedures to cover. You also need to run a test to see if students truly know the safety measures, and space it between activity days, lecture days, and review days. How much you invest in safety talks depends on the subject(s) you’re teaching. A class on math won’t require as many safety talks as a class on wilderness survival, for example.

For activities and projects, do not be afraid to use the Internet for inspiration and gather ideas. Compared to finding textual information on how things work, I find it’s much harder to find practical applications for that same information.

When I search for activities, I consider some of the following:

Does this activity meet the standards I have to follow?
Do I–or can I–get the equipment for this without significant difficulty and/or cost?
Is this safe for students to do or not?
Can I fit this into in-class time, or does it require time outside of a classroom?
Do I need to make additional materials or edits to the activity to accommodate students?
How will I manage the activity inside the classroom?
Do I need to account for disabilities or accommodations with the activity?

While many activities can be done on computers as of 2025, such as planetary orbit simulations, some activities have to be done in a physical environment and often are better done in a physical environment where students can touch, feel, and/or see what is happening.

There’s one more type of activity I want to talk about: group projects. They are usually the bane of a teacher’s and student’s existence. They can also simulate the real-world working environment shockingly well and the teacher could suddenly add in things like a manager would, like “you need to do this new thing” with less than a week left until the deadline.

The “average” group project, from observation, is when you have a group of 4-5 students, but only 1-2 of them do the majority of the work while the others coast by and pitch it an infinitesimal amount of effort on their part. If these issues happen in group projects, there are some potential solutions:

Provide the people not contributing with busywork to avoid them causing issues with the real work produced by the people actually contributing.
The students who actually did the work can meet with you and provide evidence of the work they did. From there, you can figure out how to delegate grades for each group member.
Alternatively, you could have a policy in place like “drop the lowest grade” for students who are consistently high-scoring to avoid one bad group project tanking their grade.

If the student refuses to do a particular activity or assignment because it won’t affect their grade (e.g. An A+ student doesn’t do X because they’ll still have an A regardless), then I’d advise a short meeting with them to confirm their intentions. It doesn’t have to be a long meeting; this kind of meeting can take less than 30 seconds if you’re direct and to the point about intentions.

If this becomes a problem with multiple students, I would consider adjusting your classroom management plan and how it handles grading. This could let high-performing students find alternative, but appropriate, forms of learning due to sufficient mastery and effort already demonstrated.
If said student is violent or breaks classroom rules though, it doesn’t matter what their grade is, they suffer the consequences for conduct due to how they deployed their refusal.

Lastly, with activities, you’re expected to manage students more than in lectures. Managing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but an observed fact of doing activities; you’re giving students more freedom and not confining them (mostly) to chairs or in a single spot, so your role of keeping them on task intensifies greatly.

Additionally, activities can serve as a break from “constant instruction” while also not sacrificing your learning objectives.

Review & Tests (in Implementation)

In the review stage, we get to the last “2” in my “6/2/2” setup. Review is when you’re presenting the material you’ve implemented in the previous stage, whether through lectures, activities, or a combination of the two.

In teaching, review sorts out deficiencies in learning, identifying where students struggle with the material, and demonstrating that students have “done” the learning they need.

You can prove learning through tests, quizzes, review sessions, questionnaires, exit tickets, and more. For each of these sessions, you must explicitly define the test-taking conditions, such as what is allowed, what is not allowed, how much you can help a student with questions, how to take the test, the time allotted, and what other resources they may bring into the test.

There are two ways I would separate the review days, as my example accounts for 2 days’ worth of time out of 10 days total.

1 day of testing, 1 day of dedicated review
1 day of testing, 1 day of review spread out among lecture days.

In both cases, dedicated testing is non-negotiable as you need an assessment with stakes to evaluate proper learning. The difference is how you review and check the “progress” of learning.

In the first method, this assumes you’ll set aside an entire day to review every concept and standard for the unit. Many students may appreciate this as it gives them a “breather” and time to review and reinforce areas they may have forgotten or are lacking in. Other students, however, may not want or desire this, as they’d prefer not to spend the extra time and complete the unit more quickly. A dedicated review day also allows final adjustments to determine what to review and test based on current student progress.

In the second method, you’ll still do a review, but typically at the end of each lecture day. As an example, instead of 50 minutes of dedicated review on one day, you take up the 5-10 minutes you initially allocated for downtime and “waste” and do shorter reviews on the concepts covered explicitly on that day. End-of-class reviews let you go through the unit faster, but require more pre-planning on the teacher’s part to compensate for the lost in-class time. Additionally, you’ll have to specifically remind students when a test is, as they may expect a review before the test rather than going straight into learning with a test the day after.

In general, I recommend you go with the first method: 1 day of testing with 1 day of dedicated review. The second method is more complex to implement and more challenging for students. Still, it does save you time, gives you the chance to cover more material within the year, semester, or trimester, and provides more buffer days in case of unexpected events.

“Daily Scrum” (Teacher)

Think of the daily Scrum as your reassessment of the classroom and what you got done during the day.

After each day/class session, you can see which topic(s) were covered, how well they were covered, and then spend a bit of time making minor to moderate adjustments if needed. Do NOT make major adjustments after initial planning outside of emergencies; it is a time sink and an enormous headache.

Retrospective (Teacher & Student)

Unlike the “Daily Scrum,” this occurs at the end of each unit.

This part is outside of the “6/2/2” setup as it’s done primarily through planning periods and not days where students are heavily involved. Additionally, the time spent here varies from minutes to hours, but you should not spend more than 2 to 3 hours here.

The retrospective is a time for you, as a teacher, to figure out ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your teaching plans, style, presentation, and more. You figure out what went well, what did not go well, what problems arose, and any solutions you made to solve problems you faced.

If you find significant improvements, assess the feasibility of implementation and then implement them. You may also discover new material that you didn’t cover in this unit. You may need or want to cover it in the next unit.

You can also include, typically as part of a review day, a dedicated time for students to offer genuine feedback about the class, setup, teacher, etc. It gives students a chance to voice criticisms or concerns in an open environment, which helps make them feel validated and provide a direction to improve your own teaching skills you otherwise would not find out on your own.

Though I generally support giving students “a seat at the table,” regarding their education, they must also assume responsibility for their own learning and the consequences for failure. They must own their choice(s), do the work required, and recognize it’s no longer just the instructor’s fault. Without consequences, you’re giving students power without responsibility, which is like someone making decisions for you without knowing what they’re doing.

“The One-a-week” Structure

Sometimes you won’t have multiple days per week for teaching and instead delegate a single day per week, across various weeks, for all of your class periods.

The 6/2/2 distribution still applies in this case, but it’s a little different. Rather than days, you think in terms of hours. The same rules also apply if you need to change the distribution amongst lecturing, activities/projects, and review/tests.

For example, let’s say you’re in an adult learning session and you attend a class once a week. Each class period is 2 hours long. There are two ways to split this: intraday or interday.

Intraday

In an intraday setup, you’re doing a varied distribution all within a 2-hour-long class period, and repeating this each day for every week. There are times when it’s OK–and sometimes expected–to break this rule, such as when you need an entire day for a test or mostly an activity day.

Going back to our 2-hour example, your typical classroom day may look like this:

(60%) ~72 minutes lecture
(20%) ~24 minutes projects/activities
(20%) ~24 minutes tests/review
Total: 120 minutes or 2 hours

You’ll still follow the same advice I mentioned for each category. You may replace part of your lecture test/review time with a 5-10 minute break to allow recuperation, downtime, or an excuse to grab a snack or a drink midway in class. You can subdivide that total time into further blocks, but no more than four blocks for each “topic” in this period. For example, one or two topics are lecture-heavy, but another topic is project activity-heavy, on the same day. You can distribute more “lectures” towards some topics and more “activity” towards other topics, all in the same day.

Keep in mind this setup requires strict planning on your part and equally strict time management, as it’s easy to lose track of time and sacrifice time in one topic because you spent too long in another.

Interday

Interday is similar to a typical classroom setup. Still, instead of multiple days in one week, it is various days across many weeks.

This method is more straightforward compared to intraday because you can dedicate entire days to one type of learning, if applicable, to the subject at hand. The downside, though, is that you have to plan out what to say throughout that entire period actively, or you risk losing valuable teaching time due to poor planning.

Using the same 2-hour example, we can do another distribution like this:

3 days (3 weeks) of lecture
1 day (1 week) of project/activity
1 day (1 week) of review/test

You could combine lectures and projects/activities into 4 days rather than a 3-day split, putting lectures and activities on the same day. It depends on the needs of the class and if it’s the best way to learn about what you’re teaching.

What if I have one day (or a weekend) for the entire curriculum instead of one day a week?

Pretending you’re combining multiple weeks into a day and scaling down the values and time estimates. You’ll adjust some parts depending on the material and what you need to cover, but it is doable.

To give an example, let’s say we normally need 8 weeks to teach a topic, but only have one workday (8 hours total). You could do something like this:

4 weeks of lecture –> 4 hours of lecture
2 weeks of project/activity –> 2 hours of projects/activities
2 weeks of review/test –> 2 hours split between separate review(s) and a test

Sprinkle in short breaks throughout the parts as needed or when the session requires it.

Do not underestimate how long it takes to condense information. It can take a short or extensive amount of time to convert a long-term curriculum into a shorter one.

Cost Overage vs Cost Underage (Newsvendor Model Application)

For more information, see related sources like Arrow, Harris, and Marshak (1951).

In operations and supply chains, underage cost is when demand exceeds supply, while overage cost is when supply exceeds demand. The Newsvendor model weighs the risks associated with these costs to determine optimal inventory counts for a given time period. The goal, or objective statement, is to reduce costs in general, not to go too high or too low.

A crucial difference between teaching and the Newsvendor model is Newsvendor focuses on uncertain demand, whereas teaching typically has certain demand in the form of fixed curriculums and deadlines given far in advance. Newsvendor also focuses on perishable goods, whereas teaching is non-perishable goods in the form of information.

Despite these differences, it’s still a good analogy in my opinion.

Think of your curriculum deadline for a year, semester, etc. as demand and lesson content as supply.

Overage cost is when you can’t cover all required material in time, which means cutting topics or summarizing lessons to cover standards in the curriculum.
Underage cost is when you finish covering all standards sufficiently too early, which means extra leftover time to supplement with more activites, projects, enrichment and potentially more planning or expenses.

Any disruptions, like emergencies, absences, and schedule changes, are additional risks as they can push you ahead or behind schedule. This model takes multiple variables into account and weighs the probability of going over or under the deadline, which informs how much supply to produce.

Supply, in this case, is depth/breadth of topic(s) covered.

The newsvendor framework illustrates the trade-off and shows why covering too much, or too little, in a timeframe is costly. There’s significantly more engineering, math, and statistics involved behind the scenes, but this model shows a way to optimize supply (lesson content) to meet demand (deadlines). In a real world scenario, there would be vastly more variables, constraints, and formal equations in play.

Bibliography

Arrow, K.J., Harris, T., Marshak, J. (1951) Optimal Inventory Policy. Econometrica.
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Daniels, J. (1946). The Wilson era: Years of war and after 1917–1923 (p. 624). The University of North Carolina Press.
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Obsidian Entertainment. (December 6, 2004). Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (PC Version) [Video game]. LucasArts.
- Dialogue used written by Chris Avellone.
Mason, L., & Otero, M. (2021). Just How Effective Is Direct Instruction? Perspectives on Behavior Science, 44(2-3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-021-00295-x
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