Extreme Teaching — An Agile Approach to Education

Abstract

Extreme Programming is built around core values, principles, and practices designed to align the experience of developing software with reality. You can set out to design your application with the assumption that you can anticipate all issues that will arise in a world of static requirements. What do you do when you come across an unforeseen problem or when the requirements change over time? What happens when new and better solutions become apparent in the course of development? Similarly, as instructors, we begin each new term armed with a syllabus and an idea of how the course will run. Then reality rears its ugly head. The software that was supposed to be installed in the lab for the first day of classes isn’t installed. The textbook looked better when you evaluated it last spring than it does now that you are actually trying to teach from it. The students are either much quicker, much slower, or much more diverse than you anticipated. In this workshop we’ll begin the process of selecting core values, principles, and practices that we can use to guide us in the classroom the same way that XP can help guide developers. We do not expect the practices of XP to map over. On the other hand, as an example, much of XP benefits from quick, accurate feedback. Several of the practices are based around this idea. Quick, accurate feedback obviously applies in the classroom as well and may suggest other values, principles, or practices.