Policymakers want to design the perfect policy. They want to create the perfect merit pay system. If the system being proposed is not perfect, then policymakers revert to doing nothing.Nitin then goes on to discuss the manner in which businesses deal with this uncertainty or inability to design the perfect pay system. In his post he discusses two concept with which I am very familiar and wholeheartedly endorse.
The first is 360 Degree Feedback. This concept deals with having an employee rated by several different people who maintain different relationships with the employee. In the business world, this often includes the employee's supervisor and subordinates, peers, customers and other individuals who can offer an assessment about all or part of an employee's work. The benefits are enormous, in that while a Supervisor may have more sway, a subordinate can counter what would otherwise be a mediocre evaluation with superior ratings from other individuals.
In the world of education, there are many stakeholders in a teacher evaluation, the school administration (the principal), other teachers both in and out of that teacher's focus, parents, students, support staff, etc. Each of these groups has a unique take on a teacher's performance and taken as a whole, and combined with student test scores, can easily provide an outstanding picture of a teacher's effectiveness. A 360 Degree review, while administratively more complex, is far more accurate a picture.
I don't think that many teachers would disagree that strong interpersonal skills are required to be an effective teacher. But some teachers simply don't get along with the administration for whatever reason, a 360 Degree review can obviate some of those personal preferences by principals by giving teachers who are objectively effective (via test scores) and subjectively effective (via evaluations from other stakeholders) a chance to minimize a principals effect on their evaluation.
The other concept described by Nitin is Kaizen. Kaizen is the concept of continuous improvement, the process of making something better through incremental (sometimes very small) changes. Kaizen as a business philosophy is about continuous daily improvement, whether it be process or product improvements.
The problem with teaching as it is practiced today is that many of the practitioners are working in near total or semi-isolation. Teachers are insulated from their peers, in part due to nature of the work (there can't be a lot of teachers in one room as it is a waste of time and resources), but there is also the matter of a lack of a process for examining process, procedures and outcomes.
As I have said a number of times in this space, teaching could benefit from adopting the model used by other professions, namely the law and medicine. While lawyers and doctors often work independently for much of their practice, there are professional mechanisms in place to provide for kaizen. Whether it be large, formal conferences or smaller informal meetings to discuss operations, processes, inputs and outcomes, the legal and medical professions seek continuous improvement and even the smallest change in procedures are known to have massive impacts on positive outcomes.
The way I see Kaizen in schools is simple. Continuous, practical review of lessons, tests, curricula and other educational processes and products can happen, should happen. We all know that no one is perfect and we need to embrace the idea that someone could have a better way or whose input may suggest a better way. It doesn't have to be big, it could be something as simple as changing the ordering of lessons, improving the language in a test or simply crunching the test results to improve lessons.
Educators and educrats often scoff at the idea that business practices have a place in education. Whether the viewpoint is based on the altruistic nature of the education mission, or in the belief that because you are working with children, business practices seem to have little respect within the education community. But it needn't be that way. There is a reason why American business is so successful as a community--they embrace the ideas that everyone involved in the business, from the owners and managers to the customers, has a valid take on the conduct of business. Businesses also understand that change is constant and embracing change and harnessing change for the better improves their business and their goods/services. If educators would begin to view their service from the viewpoint of a business arrangement, it can only lead to kaizen--incremental change for the better.
Hat Tip: 107th Carnval of Education.
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