REFLESS Agile Manifesto

The education world today is faced with the challenge of delivering highly skilled, personally motivated, mobile, global-oriented world citizens through an institutionalized system with limited flexibility and national constraints. It is challenged with redefining its purpose and shape in this transitional phase from literacy to ‘digitacy’, which entails significant changes in both cognition and the nature of education. In addressing this issue, we suggest an agile approach – applying a variation of work methodologies and strategies created in the world of software development and lean/just-in-time production industries focused on maintaining and promoting high rates of improvement.

The suggested framework builds its success on a set of values and principles such as welcoming changing requirements, quick and regular adaptation to changing circumstances, frequent/iterative delivery, self-organizing, cross-functional teams and motivated individuals. This bottom-up-oriented approach, based on the productive principles of learner autonomy, empiricism, collaboration, prioritization, time boxing, transparency and trust for every step within a given framework, empowers team members to fully invest themselves in team creativity and innovation. At the same time, it builds their sense of responsibility and work ethics. Through agile methods and tools we learn to enjoy the process, to produce the change and to adapt to change more easily – both when our professional field develops, and when faced with a change of environment, i.e. in a global context.

We have distilled our understanding of work into our REFLESS Agile Manifesto, comprised of 6 core principles: Empiricism, Time-boxing, Agility, Collaboration, Prioritization and Trust.