Teaching is also my second career, my first being a member of a very successful industrial team. We were all educated in continuous improvement, following Dr. Deming's philosophy, and I have to say, overwhelmingly, this company had 100's of very happy employees. Why?
1. Management, from the Vice Presidents to the supervisors all believed that those people performing the manufacturing jobs were the experts at their jobs. When an opportunity to improve the job, either in quality or performance, was acknowledged, the associates performing the job created a team, collected data, tested their theory and made proposals to management, who unquestionably accepted and implemented the changes being suggested. The teams were not made up of management, they were made up of the people performing the job and engineers. Why? Because management was educated and knew that those performing the job knew it best which made the employees feel appreciated and important. Empowerment, a very important word that is lacking for teachers in NBPS.
2. It was acknowledged that no one is perfect, and that mistakes were just an opportunity to identify an area that could be improved. Employees were not afraid of performance reviews, they were not afraid to try doing something a little differently because the element of fear had been removed. Was every employee perfect? No, but unlike NBPS, this company valued their workers so much that they preferred working with them to improve instead of harsh punishment for errors. This gave employees a feeling that they were very valuable to the company, which resulted in pride in their job, their company, and helped maintain a very healthy employee morale. The result of all this; a high quality product that is known and respected worldwide. Why won’t NBPS give teachers a chance to work in this way?
3. Walk - throughs. Employees where is previously worked welcomed observations and walk - throughs because they wanted the feedback from the supervisors on how they were performing and it was a chance to interact with management members they might not often see. They were done in a non-threatening manner, interaction was not discouraged during the observation and everyone knew that this was a tool to improve not an opportunity to punish or demean. The walk throughs that teachers have been subjected to are quite different. A team of people, often unfamiliar people, walk into the classroom with clipboards, do not acknowledge the teacher in any way, stay for approximately ten minutes, talk to a couple students, leave, and repeat this process for a couple hours, seeing a fraction of the teachers in the school. Then the doomsday report follows, a report that sums up the walk through without using any teacher names but has been invariably negative, so any feedback is not helpful. But, what it does is advertise to the community? That classrooms are not functioning properly when in fact that is not the case. And imagine what it does to the morale of the teacher who, has everything done correctly, whose classroom was operating efficiently when the team came through, but who knows that s/he was one who was part of the walkthrough that scored so low. I think it’s time to concentrate on what we are doing that is correct and build and expand upon that rather than looking so hard to find anything that might be wrong. If the environment was turned to a positive one within the school system, if the Administration and teachers could all be on the same team instead of divided as we are now, maybe the community would follow and become more positive about NBPS and NBHS in particular. I say it’s worth a try, obviously the negative, punitive environment we have now hasn’t made any positive changes.
