TM4T Techniques 5.1.3 - General Techniques: Quality Improvement

Quality Improvement (QI) in schools is generally considered separately to time management, but the principles of TM4T and QI are so closely aligned that an efficient teacher really needs to understand some QI principles. Here are the key principles which are relevant to TM4T:

a) The principle of re-use. This means that - especially for electronic resources - you always try to develop existing material, instead of starting from scratch. Many teachers - including me - really enjoy introducing new ideas and developing new lessons. This is fine, but remember that this is a luxury. A treat when time allows. Our basic method of working should be to improve something which already exists. The existing product (lesson, markscheme, document, whatever) may have flaws, but we know what those flaws are.

b) Continuous improvement. This means that you should routinely review and improve your resources and routines. The first time you do anything, the outcome is unlikely to be perfect. The trick is to learn from your experience: you must you review the outcome of your planning and factor your experience into your future plans. If you don’t do this, you will not improve. This process – of reviewing the outcome of plans to improve future planning – is at the core of self-development, and is critical in becoming a reflective teaching practitioner.

This applies, of course, to your teaching materials and teaching practice - this is what being a reflective practitioner means - but also to your non-teaching work. You will establish your T4MT system at the beginning of the teaching year, but you must review and it improve it during the year in order to be effective.

When we produce a Yearly Plan, QI principles will allow us to plan at a high-level effectively, using a basic model of working which applies to any activity: instead of just doing something - anything - we should always plan a three stage activity:

This should not just be a notion, a concept, it should be represented physically in your plans. There shouldn't reall be any 'orphaned' tasks in your plans, like this:

4 June  Computer Club Event

Significant events should always appear in groups of three, like this:

25 May    Plan Computer Club Event

 4 Jun     Computer Cub Event

 8 Jun     Review Computer Club Event

This, of course, means that our little diagram above is wrong, as QI is inherently cyclical - the learnings from the review on 8 Jun will be factored inot the planning of the next Computer Club Event:

c) Fault analysis. This approach to quality improvement is hugely influential in manufacturing industries, but woefully under-used in teaching. In manufacturing, especially of fast-moving consumer goods, customer feedback - and especially customer complaints, are closely integrated with product development. This means that a lot of attention is paid to the worst aspect of a product or service, and consequently, problems get fixed. In teaching, due to its rather odd performance assessment regime, attention is heavily focused on the best that can be done.

Some lesson-planning methods, for example magpieplanning, attempt to rectify this. Here is an short excerpt explaining the principle: click here