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By Dr. Harry Tennant

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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Improvement beyond the mousetrap

If you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.

Or so the saying (inaccurately) attributed to Emerson goes. It also reveals a bias when thinking about innovation: that innovation involves making a better product. But that's not always the case.

Apple revolutionized the music business. Some say they saved the music business when they were seeing declining CD sales and increasing (free) online music sharing. The music executives' main reaction was to start suing their customers for piracy for downloading copies of songs from their friends without paying for them. Suing your customers is rarely a good business strategy.

Apple's iTunes changed the music business. First, customers could buy music by the track rather than having to buy an entire album. Second, the tracks were inexpensive, about 99 cents. While that's not free, it's pretty cheap which made it competitive with with free (but pirated) music. Third, it was fully integrated with iPods.

iTunes was not a better mousetrap (although the iPod was). iTunes was a better means for merchandising and distribution of music. Merchandising and distribution don't have the sex appeal of product improvements, of better mousetraps. However, as the iTunes example demonstrates, it can be very important, it can save an industry.

Where will the most important innovations in education be? The primary goal is to improve student performance so we are naturally drawn to improving the "mousetrap" of education, teachers teaching in their classrooms. And there are many opportunities for such product innovations.

At the same time, just as innovation in music merchandising and distribution changed that business, changes other than classroom changes can improve education. Three foundational opportunities:

  • Behavior management - while not the goal of the school, student performance will suffer without orderly classrooms and orderly school environments.
  • Relationships - again, not a goal of the school, but supportive relationships between teachers and students and between staff and administration can make a big difference for student performance.
  • Curriculum - although many aspects of curriculum are specified in state learning standards, it is still critically important that teaching conform to learning standards and align what is taught in first grade with what is taught in second grade and so on, to make the most efficient use of instruction time.

Improvements in these areas are the iTunes of education complementing the iPod of education, learning in classrooms.

Posted at 9:24 AM Keywords: continuous improvement 2 Comments

 
Interested said...
Dr. Tennant,
This school discipline software that you have talked about in a few of your blog posts seems like a great thing for schools that are on the old paper system, but do you think it is an upgrade for schools that already have a student tracking system? And does it replace the student tracking software or is it only a student discipline system?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 7:52 AM

   
Harry Tennant said...
Thanks for your interest! Most often, software that includes a "discipline component" include discipline reporting...those events and consequences that must be reported to the state.

Discipline Manager is about managing the discipline process on your campus: keeping track of the referrals and assigned consequences, keeping track of whether consequences have been served by their due date, and if not, easily escalating the consequence. It also makes it easy to keep parents informed, collects a full discipline history and keeps track of assignments for students to work on during in-school suspension. Typically, none of this is available in reporting-only discipline systems.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012 2:11 PM

   

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