Practicing Continuous Improvement in the Classroom

An individual journey toward teaching excellence

Most faculty members who have heard about Total Quality Management (TQM) or Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) probably understand it to be some Japanese management technique used in business to get better quality products. Some may even know that it involves meeting customer needs. Probably very few college faculty members, other than those directly involved in teaching CQI, have had the opportunity to learn CQI philosophy and methodology and the tremendous implications CQI has for improving virtually any process, including the teaching/learning process.

Central Core Concepts:

• The concept of a system and a system analysis.
• Process variability, including common cause and special cause variation.
• Statistical Process Control (SPC) and control charts to identify special cause variation.
• PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle to improve processes continuously by reducing common cause variation.
• Tools to identify the root cause problems of processes and to assist in implementing new processes.

Supporting Concepts:

• Emphasis on customers, both internal and external, and their needs.
• Employee issues including:
  • Empowerment
  • Teams, including cross-functional and self directed teams
  • The value of employees
  • Emphasis on education and training

When we apply modern SPC analysis to student performance data derived from a typical college course, we find enormous variation as compared to most manufacturing processes. The situation is similar to what existed in manufacturing in the pre-Shewhart days. Quality is obtained, like the Shewhart days in manufacturing, by inspection. Those who do well on tests are graded acceptable and are passed. Those who do not perform acceptably are scrapped-rejected totally, or are reworked. Society can no longer afford this wasteful model!

We must consider alternatives to many of our current educational practices. For example, we could

• Change our current grading practices to reflect the opportunity for improvement, such as retakes on tests, mastery learning, and outcome-based evaluation.
• Adopt the philosophy that all students can learn and that our goal is to develop teaching/learning strategies that will lead us toward zero defects-no failures (Crosby, 1984).
• Believe that intelligence is the rate of learning and that natural variability exists in this process like all others and can be accounted for in appropriate teaching/learning strategies.
• Consider published outcomes and guarantees in courses-for example, in a typing course if a student buys 35 words/minute and achieves 25 words/minute, he/she can retake the course at no cost.
• Examine policies at the university that inhibit a CQI model (e.g. registration only three times per year, the need for streamlined methods to award incomplete (I) or in process (IP) grades, the need for variable credit, and course length alternatives to meet customer needs, et cetera).

For most faculty members today, the primary instructional process is based on the lecture. They learned the material this way, as did the person they learned it from, and likewise, the instructors before them. This process continues in spite of the fact that most faculty members know that the lecture is one of the least effective ways to deliver instruction, even when it is done extremely well.

Why haven't educators made more successful attempts to improve the teaching/learning process? These are the reasons. Some faculty members

• See few reasons to change; most feel they are doing just fine.
• Are far better talking about change in others than about making changes to themselves.
• Do not know how to change; they have been taught no credible alternatives to their old ways.
• Fear giving up the power that they now feel they have.
• Are by nature poorly conditioned to take risks.
• Simply don't care.

Faculty members have been much more interested in learning new content than in learning to improve their teaching. This has a striking parallel to difference between the United States and Japan in how research and development funds are expended. Historically in the United States, we have spent about 2/3 on new product research and 1/3 on new process research (Thurow, 1993). In Japan, those two figures are reversed. The result is that Japan can produce comparable product much more inexpensively than the United States can because of superior manufacturing technology. The point is that expenditures pay off.

In colleges and universities, most teaching faculty members are selected for their content expertise not their content delivery expertise. Most faculty research, travel, and faculty consulting relate to content expertise, not to the effective sharing of that content with others. Most universities have not made significant investments in omnibus attempts to improve teaching/learning process nor have their faculty invested their own time and effort to do it individually. Many faculty members have never taken a course on how to teach, some scoff at the very idea.

It is time to rethink our traditional ideas, of what teaching and learning are all about. It is time to apply what we know about process improvement to the teaching/learning process. Process improvement theory and practice have stood the test of time. These are successfully used in process improvement worldwide. It can be used to improve the process of teaching and learning in the classroom as well.

It is easier to apply TQM/CQI in the classroom than it is to apply it in practically any other place on earth. This is because of the flexibility and control that professors have in configuring their courses. If professors want to use a TQM/CQI philosophy, they can just do it. They don't even need to ask permission. It can be an individual journey toward teaching excellence.

Summarized from Sid Sytsma's paper, Professor of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, College of Business - Ferris State University.

Source: http://www.sytsma.com/tqmpap.html