Posts tagged continuous improvement
How to achieve your educational goals

You’ve set ambitious goals for your school or district, but now comes the harder question: how will you actually achieve them? It’s not for lack of effort. It’s because most improvement efforts skip the most important question in leadership: By what method?

This question sits at the center of the science of improvement. Goals don’t produce improvement. Targets don’t produce improvement. Hoping and trying harder don’t produce improvement. Only method produces improvement.

In this post, I’ll teach you a method that actually closes the gap between where your system is now and where you want it to be.

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How to set educational goals

Most goal setting I see in schools is ineffective and counterproductive. 

The typical approach is to increase the most recent results by some round percentage such as 10 or 15 or 20%.

But absent certain conditions, these “stretch” goals end up completely disconnected from reality. 

I want to teach you three conditions that will lead to much more effective goal setting.

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Viewing Education as a System II

The final insight from the systems view is the role of feedback within the system. A deep and technical dive into feedback loops goes beyond the scope of this post; I’d encourage readers to check out Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer for anyone interested in an accessible introduction to learning more about this critically important concept. However, it is worth touching on a few important points as we wrap up this series.

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