Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Continous improvement is everyone's responsibility

Edclick provides web-based applications for continuous improvement in education

Who is responsible for improving education?

• Superintendents and school boards must set the right vision and goals.
• Principals and the administration must create a culture of high expectations.
• Teachers must engage students on the right content and breath life into their students' curiosity, initiative and diligence.
• School staff must maintain an environment conducive to learning.
• Students must accept the challenge of learning and discipline themselves to do the work which learning requires.
• Parents must impress upon their children the value of education.
• The community must value and support education and schools.
• The government must adequately fund schools.

In short, everyone is responsible for education, and everyone must take responsibility for improving education. In other words, you and I are responsible for improving education.

Ask yourself: What small change can I make today to help improve education?

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Monday, June 27, 2011

Continuous improvement is easy

Edclick provides web-based applications for continuous improvement in education

Everybody would like to improve education. No one more than the educators themselves. But there are right ways to go about it and wrong ways.

One of the wrong ways is to threaten to fire teachers and close schools if standardized test results are not high enough. Threats and fear inhibits creative thinking and problem-solving rather than stimulates it.

Improvement requires change. Change requires trying new things, taking chances and, inevitably, making some mistakes. If one is in fear of losing his job or having her school closed, there will be fewer experiments done, fewer chances taken and little effective improvement.

But just because the approach to improvement based on fear is misguided doesn't mean that we may be excused from improving. We need a better approach.

Small changes are easier to make than big ones. They are less scary. If they turn out to be mistakes, there is less harm done. Many small changes aggregate into big change...big change made without fear and with a minimum of risk.

In order for small improvements to aggregate into large-scale improvement, everyone must be ever vigilant for opportunities for improvement. We must all ask ourselves throughout each day...

For that task I just completed or for that lesson I just taught, what small change could I make that would have made it 5% more efficient or more effective?

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Keywords: continuous improvement