Quality in Education

It is easy to get frustrated or discouraged by the pace at which change and continuous improvement occurs.  When you know there's a better way of doing things, there's a tendency to want to "git-r-done" quickly to reap the benefits of positive results.  Leaders must resist the temptation to force the change or continuous improvement process and work to gain consensus and buy-in.

Change occurs over a period of time. The pace of the change process is irregular and inconsistent with the most common pattern seeming to consist of occasional spurts of learning or change, separated by longer periods of apparent stability.  I believe it is during these periods of stability or "inertia" that frustration can set in.  As leaders in education, it is our responsibility to demonstrate patience, endurance and fortitude during these times while maintaining the focus on continuous improvement.

How fast is too fast?  How slow is too slow?  What is the right pace for change and continuous improvement efforts in schools?  Is anyone out there impatient, restless or discontented with the pace of change and continuous improvement? 

Jay

Posted by Jay Marino at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the core values of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence is Visionary Leadership.  Many school districts have adopted this core value as their own (as we have in the Cedar Rapids Community School District).  I often ask the question "what exactly is Visionary Leadership and how do we define it?"  It is not until we define it that we can achieve it.

Thomas Sergiovanni characterizes vision as an "educational platform" that incorporates the school's beliefs about the preferred aims, methods, and climate, thereby creating a "community of mind" that establishes behavioral norms.

Kathryn Whitaker and Monte Moses call it "an inspiring declaration of a compelling dream, accompanied by a clear scenario of how it will be accomplished." A good vision not only has worthy goals, but also challenges and stretches everyone in the school.

Robert Fritz says that organizations advance when a clear, widely understood vision creates tension between the real and the ideal, pushing people to work together to reduce the gap.

Some interesting web sites on visionary leadership:
- http://www.visionarylead.org/visionary_leadership_article.htm
- http://www.motivation-tools.com/workplace/visionary_leadership.htm
- http://cepm.uoregon.edu/publications/digests/digest110.html

How do you define visionary leadership?  How do you practice it and deploy it?  Is vision top down or bottom up?  How do leaders facilitate vision?

Why don't you weigh in and post your comment?

Jay

Posted by Jay Marino at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Educators need to be able to define quality and continuous improvement in order to achieve it.  It has been my experience that in education we "talk" quality without a clear understanding of what it really is.  We say we're focused on continuous improvement, without really being able to define what we mean.  Until an organization can define quality and describe what continuous improvement looks like, it won't be able to clearly set and communicate direction for future success with quality.

It is the responsibility of leadership to "paint a vivid picture" of what quality and continuous improvement look like, sound like and feel like.  It is only when stakeholders can define it and personalize it that they can achieve it.  District leaders need to define it so it can be understood by school leadership teams.  School leadership teams need to interpret it so it can be understood by classroom teachers (In Cedar Rapids, we refer to a document titled "If a vistor came to a classroom focused on continuous improvement...").  Teachers need to define it and translate it so it can be understood by their students.  Ultimately in the schools, students need to define quality and make a personal comittment to continuous improvement.  When all stakeholders define qualty and continuous improvement and make it theirs, real change occurs.

How do you define quality?  What does continuous improvement mean to you?  How would you explain these concepts to others?  Share you comments!

Jay

Posted by Jay Marino at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As with any initiative, continuous improvement and quality efforts in a school system must have clearly defined goals and outcomes.  It is the responsibility of leadership to clearly set and communicate direction and to paint a vivid picture of what it looks like when its accomplished. 

Imagine the task of trying to complete a 1000 piece puzzle without seeing the cover of the puzzle box!  How would you feel?  Would you be frustrated and angry that you were asked to complete a task without knowing what the final product should look like?  School leaders need to make sure that when implementing continuous improvement:

1.) Clear expectations are set and communicated with stakeholders
2.) There is a plan to create internal capacity and support for change
3.) There is a way to measure the deployment of continuous improvement

In the Cedar Rapids Community School District, we set and communicate expectations through the use of 4-Level Continuous Improvement Outcomes.  In addition, a deployment instrument is used to measure continuous improvement efforts.

How do you measure progress toward continuous improvement?  How do you set and communicate direction for continuous improvement in your school or district?

Jay

Posted by Jay Marino at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Change is all around us.  Educators that are engaged in continuous improvement efforts are always looking for more effective best practices and processes… in other words- CHANGE.  Organizations that understand and manage the change process are more likely to deliver results.

Who’s responsibility is it to manage change?  It’s not the staff’s responsibility, but rather the administration.  Leaders must manage change in a way that staff can cope with it.  Leaders have the responsibility to facilitate and enable change, especially to understand the situation from an objective standpoint (to 'step back', and be non-judgmental), and then to help people understand reasons, aims, and ways of responding positively according to employees' own situations and capabilities. Increasingly the leader’s role is to interpret, communicate and enable - not to instruct and impose, which nobody really responds to well.  Managing the change process is no easy task!

John Kotter's book 'Leading Change' (1995) describes a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people's response and approach to change, in which people see, feel and then change.  Kotter's eight step change model can be summarized as:

1. Increase urgency - inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant.
2. Build the guiding team - get the right people in place with the right emotional commitment, and the right mix of skills and levels.
3. Get the vision right - get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
4. Communicate for buy-in - Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply, and to appeal and respond to people's needs. De-clutter communications - make technology work for you rather than against.
5. Empower action - Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders - reward and recognize progress and achievements.
6. Create short-term wins - Set aims that are easy to achieve - in bite-size chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives. Finish current stages before starting new ones.
7. Don't let up - Foster and encourage determination and persistence - ongoing change - encourage ongoing progress reporting - highlight achieved and future milestones.
8. Make change stick - Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion, new change leaders. Weave change into culture.
   

Learn more about the change process at these web sites:
http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/90
http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/s/j/sjm256/portfolio/kbase/Systems&Change/ChangeProcess.html
http://www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/edscpro.html
http://www.mdk12.org/process/10steps/index.html
http://www.dhutton.com/change/process.html

What have been your greatest struggles with the change process?  How have you approached change in your organization?  What do you do when people resist change?

Jay

Posted by Jay Marino at 07:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)