By Dr. Harry Tennant
Monday, December 4, 2017 Improving student behavior schoolwideLet's say your school has a big problem with tardies. It seems that tardies are out of control. What do you do? A quick search of tardy solutions reveals candidates.
There are lots of things to try. Some might work, some might not. Some may reduce tardies a little, others might reduce tardies a lot. We could just start trying solutions randomly but there is a more orderly way to do it. It's called the PDCA cycle and is widely used outside of education for continuous improvement. PDCA stands for Plan-Do-Check-Analyze.
It's hard to predict how well solutions to complicated problems are going to work in your environment. What worked for others may not work for you, and vice versa. So, experiment but expreriment in a orderly way so you can learn along the way. The key to success is to run lots of experiments quickly and cheaply in order to discover the right solution(s). Repeat the PDCA cycle until the problem is solved. Do it in an orderly fashion following the simple PDCA cycle, keeping track of your plans, results and analyses for each cycle. You will be glad you documented your attempts and progress when your superintendent asks, "Hey, how did you solve that tardy problem?" Posted at 12:00 AM Keywords: PDCA cycles , continuous improvement 0 Comments |