In January and February, I outlined six common management myths. The point of those two posts was to help education systems leaders see what not to do. I’m now turning to a set of principles that can be used by these same leaders to guide their transformation work. I’ll kick things off this month with a brief introduction and a bit of background information regarding the 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation. From there, I’ll describe each of the principles through twice monthly posts from April through November.
Read MoreOver the last two months, I described six common management myths W. Edwards Deming worked to dispel. In January, I tackled the myth of best practices, the myth of the hero educator, and the myth of performance appraisal. In February, I turned to another set of three myths including the myth of merit pay, the myth of accountability, and the myth of extrinsic motivators. The point of these two posts was to help education systems leaders see what not to do. I’m now going to turn to a set of 14 Principles that can be used by educational leaders to guide their transformation work. I’ll kick things off this month with an introduction to the Principles for Transformation. After this introduction, I’ll write twice monthly posts describing each principle.
Read MoreLast month, I described three common management myths W. Edwards Deming worked to dispel. These included the myth of best practices, the myth of the hero educator, and the myth of performance appraisal. I cautioned that it is important to keep in mind that you may very well experience some cognitive dissonance as you read. There is a counterintuitive thread to much of the Deming philosophy, which of course makes sense given that he advocated for a change in state from the prevailing system of management to something better. This month, I’ll unpack the myth of merit pay, the myth of accountability, and the myth of extrinsic motivators.
Read MoreAny attempts at educational transformation need to sit on top of a solid philosophical foundation. This idea was introduced in the first two posts of this series (see here and here). December’s post also described a few management myths. This post and the next will be spent describing other common management myths W. Edwards Deming worked to dispel. As you read the myths, it is important to keep in mind that you may very well experience some cognitive dissonance. There is a counterintuitive thread to much of the Deming philosophy, which of course makes sense given that he advocated for a change in state from the prevailing system of management to something better. This month, I’ll be unpacking the myth of best practices, the myth of the hero educator, and the myth of performance appraisal.
Read MoreLast month, I posed the following question - Do we really need to transform our education system? - and posited that any attempts at transformation needed to sit on top of a solid philosophical foundation. The purpose of this blog post is to make the case for transformation from the prevailing style of management to the philosophy developed by W. Edwards Deming across a lifetime of continual improvement work. It is on this foundation that our education system should stand rather than constantly shifting in the wind based on management mythology, the latest testing data points, and political pet projects.
Read MoreThere are frequent calls for transformation and reform in the education sector going back decades. As a starting point, I’m going to examine two reports -- one well-known (“A Nation at Risk”) and the other lesser so (the “Sandia Report”) -- that attempt to answer the question posed in the title. Over the next several posts, I will offer my own thoughts as to the need for educational transformation (spoiler alert, I think it is necessary). In those future articles, I’ll provide a definition for transformation as well as a description for what exactly we would be transforming from and what we would be transforming to. But first, let’s dive into those two reports.
Read MoreThe four components of the System of Profound Knowledge interact with each other and cannot be separated. For example, as outlined in last month’s post, the Theory of Knowledge relies on one’s ability to separate statistical variation into common and special causes to learn about and improve a system. Each part of Profound Knowledge is interdependent and equal in importance. Nonetheless, in my study, if there is one of the four components that seems to flow through each of the others, it is Psychology. Psychology involves understanding the actions and reactions of people in everyday circumstances.
Read MoreHow do we improve the math engagement rates discussed in last month’s post? In other words, what would your theory be for improving these rates?
Don’t get too caught up in the idea of theory. By theory I mean any set of assumptions that you use to predict what’s going to happen in the future. Here, I simply mean the plan or strategy you’d suggest to improve those rates. The plan or strategy you choose is based on the prediction that it will improve the 8th grade math engagement rates, and your underlying rationale for your choice in plan or strategy is your theory. Theory of Knowledge then is the study of how what we think we know and claim to know actually is the way we claim it is.
There is variation in everything we observe and measure in schools. Knowledge about Variation provides a tool kit by which to understand this variation. Educators are inundated with data, but what’s much more difficult is knowing how to interpret and make sound decisions with it. Do this year’s state test scores indicate that our district is improving? Was last month’s drop in per pupil revenue a sign of things to come? Did attendance rates improve this week because of the intervention we put in place or was it due to something else? The ability to answer questions like these is fundamental to our ability to make improvements.
Read MoreAppreciation for a System quite literally means that we step back and see the organization we lead as a system. Dr. Deming recognized that organizations are characterized by a set of interactions among the people who work there, the tools, methods, and materials they have at their disposal, and the processes through which these people and resources join to accomplish its work. This is the essence of a system. In my experience, systems leaders fall short of this appreciation most commonly in two areas. First, we overemphasize the extent to which problems can be attributed to individual educators as opposed to the underlying system. Second, we often fail to appreciate the idea that improvement in one area of our school system can lead to a decline in performance in the system as a whole.
Read MoreI have this hunch that we’ve significantly underappreciated the role of theory in school improvement. My basic hypothesis is that the vast majority of educators doing improvement work are doing so without a sound theoretical foundation. Instead, we’re overly focused on techniques and tools, but in the absence of theory to guide us, there can be no learning. I’ve been writing about the System of Profound Knowledge over the course of the last 20 months because it has transformed my thinking about managing and improving schools.
Read MoreHow many of you have pursued the school improvement “magic elixir''?
The “magic elixir” has come in many forms across my more than two-decade career in education, and I suspect you’ll recognize its siren song even if you haven’t fallen prey yourself. It may have reared its head as a reading curriculum, an online tutoring platform, a revised organizational structure, or a new five-year strategic plan. You may have dabbled in all four of these areas—curriculum, online programs, human capital planning, and strategic initiatives—among many others. The attraction to these “magic elixirs” doesn’t seem to weaken, even when you recognize that there is no such thing.
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