Institute thorough job-related training for students, teachers, staff, and management, so that everyone can make better contributions to the system. New skills are required to keep up with changes in cognitive science, curricula, methods, learning experience design, technology, teaching techniques, services, etc.
Read MoreIn 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. Earlier this month, I introduced the 14 Principles for Educational Systems Transformation. In this post I’ll describe the first principle, Create Constancy of Purpose.
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.
Read MoreFor the past three months, I’ve been writing about organizational goal-setting. In Part I of the series, I proposed four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal. In Part II, I introduced the idea of “arbitrary and capricious” education goals and key data analysis lessons 1-5 . In this installment, I’ll outline key lessons 6-10 and then tie up the series in Part IV with an applied example from United Schools Network.
Read MoreJanuary is a popular month to set new goals, so I decided to kick-off this year with a four-part series on this very topic. In Part I of the series, I proposed four conditions that organizations should understand prior to setting a goal.
Organizations should understand the capability of the system or process under study.
Organizations should understand variation within the system or process under study.
Organizations should understand if the system or process under study is stable.
Organizations should have a logical answer to the question, “By what method?”
Absent an understanding of these conditions, goals are too often “arbitrary and capricious.”
At a recent district leadership team meeting, I put the following quote up on a slide: “Goal setting is often an act of desperation.”1 We are in the midst of updating our strategic plan at United Schools Network, so the purpose of the quote was to start a discussion on healthy goal-setting and to provide a framework for any goal-setting the team would do as a part of this process. I think the typical reaction to the quote is something like the following: “But I thought goal-setting was something highly effective people and organizations do?” I would argue however, that this is rarely the case, be it in organizations or accountability systems, and only can be true if a number of conditions are met during the process.
Read MoreA critical component of the Planning phase of the cycle is the idea of operational definitions. The concept of operational definitions is straightforward. The idea is that language must be made operational in order to perform the basic functions in an organization. To put it another way, an operational definition puts communicable meaning into a concept. Concepts that are important to schools such as attendance, engagement, and learning have no communicable value until they are expressed in operational terms.
Read MoreLast month, I discussed a powerful tool, the process behavior chart, that can be used to filter the noise out of our data. The whole point of this series has been to think through how to properly interpret and react to data, which includes the filtering process. Unfortunately, much of what happens on the data analysis front in the education sector is akin to writing fiction. Writing fiction will be the main topic of this post.
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Last month, I discussed the difference between information and knowledge by analogizing the two concepts to data ponds (information) and data streams (knowledge). A key idea in the transformation of information to knowledge is adding the element of time and visualizing the data in a tool called a process behavior chart. Part of the power of the process behavior chart (PBC) is its ability to filter out the noise in our data; the idea of filtering out data “noise” is the focus of this post.
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Each part of the SoPK is interdependent and equal in importance. Nonetheless, if there is one of the four components that seems to flow through each of the others, it is psychology. A leader of organizational transformation must understand the psychology of individuals, the psychology of groups, the psychology of society, and the psychology of change.
Read MoreIn the last written work of his long life, The New Economics, Deming had this to say about variation:
Variation there will always be, between people, in output, in service, in product. What is the variation trying to tell us about a process and about the people that work in it?
The main point that Deming was making was that outcomes are either good or bad by the time we look at them. The enemy is variation and the sources of variation in and around the process that produced the outcome. When you combine this point with the core idea of systems thinking - that most results belong to the system - you begin to see your organization through a completely new lens.
School and district report cards were released in mid-September to little fanfare because they lacked state test scores. These scores form the heart of the report cards, but were missing from this year’s reports because the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and prevented spring testing. Maybe this year provides an opportunity to stop and think about a couple of questions related to the report cards. Questions such as, what do the report cards tell us about schools? And, should we be rating and ranking schools?
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