In Their Own Words

In this episode, David and Andrew talk about Common Cause Variation vs Special Cause Variation, and the problem of confusing the two. Using the example of transgender students, David describes how a system's capability should be expanded rather than using that special cause situation as a weapon to destroy the entire system.

TRANSCRIPT

Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is weaponizing special causes. David take it away.

Langford: It sounds very dangerous, and it is. So I wanted to get into a little bit about special and common causes about what Deming talked about. So once again, we'll go back to Deming's system of profound knowledge. And as part of that he talked a lot about understanding variation in systems and without getting too statistical about things, he basically got people to identify two different types of variation. So there's common cause variation, which typically makes up anywhere from oh 94% to 98, 99% of what goes on in any system or any process. And then there's special cause variation, which is generally less than 2% or less than 1% of what goes on. So that sounds pretty innocuous until you actually start thinking about how that works out in society and systems and classrooms, especially in education in schools and Deming said over and over and over that there are basically two problems with special and common cause. So people treat special cause as if it's common, okay. Which is, and he called these deadly diseases, or they treat common cause variation as if it's special.

Langford: So sometimes it's difficult to sort of understand what is, what does that mean? So let's take an example like in a, in a school common cause variation would be say the, the performance of a whole school or a state or a nation or whatever it might be. You can chart that out over a long period of time and start to see a certain level of predictability of performance on anything you wanna look at, whether you're talking about behavior or you're talking about test scores or grades or kids showing up for school every day. Doesn't really matter what system you wanna look at. When you start looking at it from a systems perspective, you wanna look at as much data as you can.So at least six or seven data points, but preferably 12 and some, a lot of statisticians will say up to 20 data points.

Langford: So if you're just looking at, say test scores over a long period of time, well, you'd wanna actually look at average test scores over a 20 year period. So that, that could take a really long time to see data systems like that emerge, especially in education where we have what I call slow data that emerges. You're familiar with like manufacturing environments and business, where you have a lot of fast data. So you may be making something and you're collecting a hundred thousand data points in a single day or a month or a week where in education, it, it really doesn't really work like that.

Stotz: I have an example that may be helpful for those people that aren't familiar with the topic. And that is in my coffee factory, we fill bags of coffee with, let's say a hundred grams of coffee. If we fill it with 101, well, we're giving away. If we fill it with 99, we're not delivering what we say. And what first lesson that we learned is that nobody's perfect. No, there is no way to consistently hit 100 is always gonna be some variation. Now that variation may be 100.0 1, 4 7, but ultimately variation around that is bad. And what you find is that maybe when the system is not that strong, you could be putting in 95 grams on sometimes and you could be putting in 105 on sometimes and something in between those. But those are all kind of common causes.

Stotz: There's just there's variation about that average, let's say. And then the only way to improve that would to be say, 'oh, well, we need to have a more precise piece of equipment.' It's not that the workers weren't working hard enough or something, but we just didn't have, so we replace a piece of equipment that's measuring and all of a sudden we weigh more consistently the old clunky one didn't work that well, and now we're getting more and more narrow. And then one day the electricity goes off or we have a, a problem with the electricity and all of a sudden it's throwing the whole system off. Well, that would be some special cause as opposed to this common variation around the 100 that we're aiming for, would I be describing it? Right or how would you add to that?

Langford: Yeah, that, that that's exactly right. And so if we charted out filling your coffee bean bags over a long period of time, we'd probably find out that you'r, you probably have a really good system, right? So let's put it in terms of like grams or something. So you might find out that your variation is anywhere from 98 grams to 101 or a hundred, two grams. Right. And this also ties in with the last podcast we did about loss function. Because if you say, well, we're selling hundred gram bags, well, the further we move away from optimization or the optimum of a hundred grams, like what you were saying, if we're filling it too much, we're losing money. And if you're filling it too little, well, there might be a customer out there that feels cheated and might not ever buy your coffee ever again, because they, they weighed it and said, oh, this is only 99 grams.

Langford: Right? So there, and if you, the further that you would go away from that optimum 100 grams, and let's say that all of a sudden, you sent out a coffee bag that only had 90 grams in it. Now somebody could get really upset, right? Because that's a long way from the optimum of a, of a hundred grams or the opposite, right? If, if you're all of a sudden, randomly filling bags at 111 grams, well, now you take that 11 grams times the price of coffee beans. And like you said, you're losing a lot of money a lot of time.

Stotz: So it's one, one thing I would add to it is that now imagine that we're measuring it very well, and we're getting a little variation. We're getting 101 sometimes. And 99, occasionally we get 102, occasionally we get 98, but it's in a relatively tight range. Now imagine that I start rewarding the employees when it goes, you know to a certain level and I start to identify if you hit this, that you're gonna get a bonus, I'm gonna dock your pay. Well, I would just be messing around with what are really just common causes of variation that have nothing to do with the employees. They have to do what that system can do.

Langford: That's what Deming called tampering. You're tampering with the system and you're, and you're making false assumptions, cuz you're assuming that, oh, by holding somebody up as employee of the month that'll make everybody else work harder. So your assumption is that everybody else is not working harder. And the only way to get 'em to work harder is for me to manipulate 'em in some way. And Deming said that you you're now tampering with the system. You're making things worse, not better because pretty soon you have employees that say, well I'm not gonna do a really good job this month because you're offering that bonus you know, for most improved employee. Well, I can't be most improved if I'm always great, right? So one month I'm gonna look bad so I can look really good the next month.

Langford: So I can win that trip to Aruba, right? And now your coffee, the grams per sack are going down. And so everything's going haywire and everything else. And then, then you wanna blame the people in the system and not understanding that as management, you did this. You caused this to happen. And it's exactly the same way in a school classroom for education. If you start tampering with learning systems in the classroom. So most of the variation or performance of a system is built into the system. And that's what Deming talked about. Statistically like in 98, 98% of the result is coming from the system itself.

Stotz: Right. So don't like the results? Don't blame the people, blame the system. So are, are there people problems and systems that are special causes? Absolutely. And what do you do when that happens?

Langford: So like in your example, with your coffee company once in a while, maybe you just, you hire someone that hates coffee, really shouldn't be there, they're there for the wrong reasons. They don't really love what's going on, you know? So what do you do? Well, instead of like changing the whole system based on that special cause person, right? Now, everybody has to do something different because we have this one person who's got defective behavior, so to speak, you just, you deal with the one person. Maybe they're just in the wrong job. I mean, they, they should be answering the phone in the company, not actually dealing with products or, or vice versa. Maybe they just can't deal with people. So maybe they should be in a position. So you're gonna make an adjustment. You're gonna shift that one person. And ultimately, maybe they're just in the wrong profession and maybe you need to help them find another job.

Stotz: And I just, I just wanna go back because it's such a common thing that people talk about about what Deming says about the output of the system is coming from a certain amount and the output the impact that a worker has for instance. And one of the sources of that is looking at the standard deviations. From the average, if you look at one standard deviation plus and minus you come up with 68% are within that range. If you go two standard deviations, now you're at 95%. And I believe it was that two standard deviation where he's saying, look, if something's happening within these two standard deviation, it's just common cause variation. No. He was actually talking about three standard deviations.

Stotz: Yeah. So three standard deviations would be what? 99.7%

Langford: Yeah. St yeah. Statistically it's like 99.9999998%. Right. Of something. And you know, why three standard deviations away from the, the mean, or the average? Well, because when you get to that point, if something is falling in that less than 1%, you could be pretty sure that's, that's, that's a special cause. Right? This doesn't normally happen in our, in our system. Well, the same thing in a classroom, if, if a teacher's teaching a lesson and every year when they, he or she teaches this lesson, everybody in the class scores, like, let's say 95 to a hundred. Right, right. And every year I get better and better. And my variations shrinks. And pretty soon I've got, now I'm getting an average about 98 percentile of people when they go through this lesson, right? Well, that's telling you that most of the variation is good within that system. So when people are randomly thrown into that classroom, that teacher is so good they can get that same result with almost anybody thrown it into that classroom.

Stotz: And then now.

Langford: What happens, that system is like that it becomes predictable. Now I can predict that next year. I'm probably gonna get an average somewhere between 95 and a hundred percent, if I keep doing what I've been doing.

Stotz: And what happens to that teacher when they see, oh, wait a minute, we've got this one kid who's getting a 62.

Langford: Then obviously, because you understand systems performance and you understand a little bit about special and common cause data, obviously this is a special cause there's okay. So it could be a learning difficulty. It, it could be home situation. It could be something psychological, it could be, could be a lot of things. Right. And so what do you do with a special cause? Well, typically like in the education system, we basically tried to get rid of 'em for years and we get, we would get rid of them in many different ways. Like, I'll, I'll just give them a failing grade and that that'll get rid of 'em eventually. I'll send 'em out in the hallway, isolate them. I'll, we'll send them to special education classes. We don't we don't wanna have a mainstream in the class because it's a special cause.

Langford: And it's gonna take special effort to do, to work with that special cause and work through that. So veteran teachers that are really super good at dealing with students with special causes are amazing. Just amazing how no matter what the difficulty is or what the special cause that child starts to feel like they're part of the system, part of what's going on. Now, they may never get the same data as 98% of the rest of the students that come through that system, but they can also get better and better and better with, within that same system. And you that's the exciting thing about education is to think about how special causes can be transformed.

Stotz: You remind me when I was in living in West Hartford, Connecticut, when I was just a little kid, I was all kinds of trouble in the classroom. And I was just, I just was all kinds of trouble. And they sent me to some special class to get some special help. And I ended up reentering the normal class and coming back kind of into a normal behavior, cuz they helped me kind of work on some of the things that were issues for me. And I ended up becoming a good student. But imagine...

Langford: You had, you had shock shock therapy or something.

Stotz: Yeah. They, they got me, they just a minor lobotomy this, but so now let's think about this cuz the, the title of today is weaponizing special causes. We've had a great discussion now about what are common, what are special? And I'm just imagining, like, let's just say that a teacher's doing really well, but they have this one student doing poorly and we know it's identified as a special cause. And then all of a sudden they decide, wow, I've gotta redo my whole way that I'm educating because of this particular unique situation. Would that be wise?

Langford: Well, it be insanity is what it would be. And we don't have to go very far, especially in the United States right now to see this happening. So there are transgendered children that that's, that's a fact, everybody knows this is happening, etcetera. But because I have one transgender child in my classroom or my school does not mean I changed the entire system based on a special cause. And now I'm disrupting 99.8% of all, all the students and parents and everybody else that comes through the system because I'm making this system twist to accommodate only a special cause. So and Deming said, this is one of the deadly diseases. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna change the whole bathroom structure into building. I'm gonna change the whole, how PE is run. I'm gonna, we're gonna change. We're gonna change everything because we have two children out of 1400 that may be transgender.

Langford: So I don't want to, I don't wanna offend anybody by this or anything else, but I just wanna point out that you can spend literally millions of not billions of dollars. go weaponizing special causes. And this is, this is just one example and PE uh districts are now building schools., where's, they're changing the bathrooms and getting rid of gender and all kinds of things based on only a few special causes. Whereas what should be happening is what do special causes needing these special, special help? So if they need a special bathroom, that's, that's fine. And there's a transition or gender bathroom for those two students out of 1400. Yeah. But just suddenly you start making rules, regulations policy I've seen district policy. That's just crazy based on maybe one instant instance every 10 years or so. And you're, you're changing an entire system based on that. is it that maybe gonna help that one individual? Yeah. But it's the same example as, as you gave, right? instead of changing the whole school because you were having difficulty in a classroom, what did we do? Well, we got you some help, right? Yeah. And basically you need discipline and people don't, people don't understand what discipline means. The first definition of discipline and the dictionary is training.

Langford: So you needed some training, right? This is what you do and this is what you can't do and in a classroom and everything else. And when you got that kind of training and it was better for you because you felt like you were belonging and you didn't have to be disruptive anymore. And it was better for everybody else because they could accept you. Right. They didn't, they weren't all of a sudden afraid that you were gonna fly out the handle or go crazy.

Stotz: Yeah. It's, it's interesting about the transgender stuff because in Thailand Thai people are just really accommodating to transgender. It's not a big deal. I mean, and in fact, the transgender people here are people who really speak up for kind of their rights. They're more outspoken. Whereas other people kind of go along more than let's say we're used to in the west. so they're there, it's just been fascinating to watch. And I think that the point is, and it's a little bit like handicap as an example we did decide to put in ramps to, to locations. And that was an adaptation to the system to accommodate the needs of that small group, but we didn't reshape a huge amount of things and other people in...

Langford: That. Well, what you're trying to do is well we see it now in medicating children with drugs and all kinds of stuff to help them learn better. And and in some cases, some schools and places you're, you're talking about 20, 25% of the population is now being medicated. Well, that's the, that's the opposite of what Deming talked about is treating special causes as if they're common that this is a common thing. So we're gonna do this with everybody. But these special causes are very, very rare, whether it's some kind of a mental thing or transgender thing or whatever it might be, you're talking about less than 1% of the population generally. And when you start to transfer a special cause to a whole population, that's what I'm talking about, about weapon weaponizing a special cause. And then ultimately you can do that with anything, but what you're really trying to do, and you comment about the, the handicap access, etcetera. What you're really trying to do is expand the capability of a system so that there are fewer and fewer and fewer special causes, not going the opposite direction, where the system becomes less and less and less and less capable. And so pretty soon everybody starts looking like a special cause.

Langford: And and that becomes hugely expensive and not very productive when you're treating everybody like their special cause.

Stotz: So let me try to summarize a little bit about what we've talked about. First of all, we talked about the importance of understanding variation. And we talked about the idea that 94 to 99% of variation is actually common cause, and only maybe one or 2% is special cause, and you, you mentioned about treating special causes as common was what Dr. Deming calls deadly diseases. You also talked about tampering, which is when you're chasing around common cause variation and either rewarding it or punishing it or highlighting it as success when in fact you really are having false assumptions. And the best way to think about that is that you walk into McDonald's and it's got a picture of the employee of the month and it's just a rotation. And then you talked about identifying the special cause, let's say it's a poor performing student.

Stotz: And then thinking about how do we how do we deal with this special cause? And it doesn't make sense necessarily to change the whole system because of what we're seeing with the special cause. And finally, I'm gonna add in my last little bit I wrote down when you were speaking is let variation run! Allow variation. It is the beauty of nature. It is the beauty of human. It is the beauty of system. Stop trying to attack every variation through medicine or through all these different things. Let variation free. Let variation run. Anything you'd add to that.

Langford: No, it's no, that's, that's good. It's a good summary. Yeah. It's in some ways it's very, very simple to think about. But in other ways, it's, it's very complex and in many ways, very contrary to the common society and businesses and schools and the way they're run today.

Stotz: It's simple. But not always easy.

Langford: Yeah. And I think that's why Deming calls it profound knowledge. You have to have profound knowledge and profound means deep. You have to have a deep knowledge of something if you're gonna manage properly.

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for the discussion for listeners. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. David, what's the best way that people can contact you if they wanna learn more?

Langford: You could go to our website, which is LangfordLearning.com, and there you can find out resources and support material etcetera.

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. People are entitled to joy in work.

What is the Taguchi Loss Function and how does it apply to education? In this episode, Andrew and David talk about statistician Genichi Taguchi's idea that the further you move from a measurable quality target, the more quality is lost, even if the item still "meets specifications." David shows how you can apply this to education.

(For more about the Tachugi Loss Function, visit Wikipedia or Christopher Chapman's Digestible Deming blog post.)

TRANSCRIPT

Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, Taguchi loss function. David, take it away.

Langford: Thank you, Andrew. And I liked how your eyes got really big when you said Taguchi loss function. Oh my gosh, it sounds frightening, doesn't it?

Stotz: It does. It's a little bit overwhelming, it's exciting. I'm interested to learn.

Langford: And in education, it's probably less known than it is in business. Usually when I'm working with a group of business leaders and I mention that I can get pretty strong - two-thirds of the audience probably knows something about the Taguchi loss function. I was at a conference with a whole roomful of school superintendents and I asked them, Anybody know what the Taguchi loss function was? And not a single hand went up. So less well known, but just as applicable. So in one of the earlier podcasts, we were talking about the concept of optimization of the system. And I just wanna refresh our memories and the memory of our listeners that it's really based on Deming's System of Profound Knowledge as well. So the four parts that Deming had was, Appreciation for a System, Understanding Variation, and especially statistical variation, Psychology and Knowledge of Theory. And I always add neuroscience to that mix as part of profound knowledge, because it's really critical to understand, especially in education, how the brain actually processes information.

Langford: So when we're talking about the optimization of a system, we're actually talking about all of those factors being optimized, especially in a classroom or a school. So you can't just sort of optimize one thing, for instance. So over the last 30 years, I've known principals that are just really, really good managers, excellent at running the building. They never do anything out of the ordinary, everything is always perfect. The trash cans are always where they're supposed to be. They're just really good managers. They're the kind of people that if you're gonna take a school trip and they have to organize something complex, that's the kind of people you want. But if you're gonna do something really super innovative, change the system in some way, do something that's never been done before, that's not the kind of person that you want.

Stotz: Right, it's interesting that you just mentioned that optimizing so many different factors, that's part of the reason why people don't do it because it is complex. David, I just pulled up Wikipedia and I thought maybe it would be interesting if we see what Wikipedia says about what is the Taguchi loss function. Would you like me to read a little bit of that?

Langford: Yeah, so, go ahead.

Stotz: According to Wikipedia, the Taguchi loss function is graphical depiction of loss developed by the Japanese business statistician, Genuichi Taguchi to describe a phenomenon affecting the value of products produced by a company. Praised by Dr. W Edwards Deming. It made clear the concept, of the quality does not suddenly plummet when, for instance, a machinist exceeds a rigid blueprint tolerance. Instead, loss in value progressively increases as variation increases from the intended condition. This was considered a breakthrough in describing quality and help fuel the continuous improvement movement.

Langford: So now that we've lost about 80% of our audience...

Stotz: Oops, sorry about that.

Langford: No, that's... It's actually correct, and Taguchi was actually a contemporary of Deming, and Deming always referred to Taguchi as having one of the best, the greatest breakthroughs in systems. I really wanna focus on in education and applying this kind of thinking to education and what would that mean? So I think we looked at a Taguchi loss function diagram and if you could pull that up on the screen?

Stotz: Yeah, let me pull that up for the video viewers and I'll walk you through and we'll walk you through for the audio listeners.

Langford: And then we'll put a link in the show notes for that.

Stotz: Yep.

Langford: If you wanna contact it later. So basically you have to start to think about... And then, in the diagram right in the very middle of the diagram, is the target or what Deming would talk about as a system that's perfectly optimized. And in that, there's not losses on either side. And basically, without getting in into too much statistics or math or anything like that, the further you move away from that optimum state, the greater the loss. So, I wanna talk...

Stotz: And maybe for the listeners, I'll just describe it. We're looking at a parabola. So we have... On the Y axis, we have the level of loss. In other words, if it goes down on the Y axis, the loss is going down. And on the X axis we have the value of the characteristics, meaning we wanna hit some target and the parabola is going up if you go too far away. So loss is rising if you go too far to the right or loss is rising if you go too far to the left. So, in fact, that's kind of interesting. Both if you're off target either way, it's still gonna bring you loss.

Langford: So let me give you a very practical education example. My good friend, Dr. Doug Stilwell in Iowa, when he was a school superintendent, his problem was that, parents were complaining when... The time that they would get called when there was a snow day or a school cancellation during the winter. And so these complaints just had gone on year after year, after year for 20 years. And so finally, when I taught him about the Taguchi loss function, he did a little study with parents to find out the optimum time to be called. And so sent out surveys and said, "What would be the optimum time?" And if I recall, it ended up the perfect time was like 6:20 in the morning. So the further, the earlier you did it as you move towards say 6 o'clock or even earlier, if you went all the way to 5:30, then the losses became huge. There's these tons and tons of people did not like that. And on the other side, if 6:20 was the optimum, the closer and closer that you move towards 7 o'clock, there's already people going to work and making other plans and not being informed, etcetera.

Langford: And so the losses are mounting on that side as well. And so he ended up implementing a system that in explaining parents always even new parents coming into the system that, "You will receive a notification by 6:20 every morning whether or not there's gonna be a school closure." And guess what? Complaints virtually disappeared completely. So I think it's a really good example about you can optimize... Even sometimes people say, "Oh well, that's not a big deal, and I'll just put up with the complaints." But why would you wanna do that? Why would you wanna have parents calling board members and calling the school and complaining about this and that. And it goes back to really making people happy within the system, but you're not just making them happy just for happy's sake, you're making them happy because you're doing a really good job of managing with the input of the people in the system because they're the most knowledgeable about the systems.

Langford: So, so many managers will make a decision like that, it could be based on what's best for the front office. It could be that the decision is what's best for me as a manager. I don't like to get up before 6 o'clock in the morning and check the weather and have that to be the first thing I do during the day. And so I'm gonna do it at this time, but have no systems knowledge. They haven't taken the time to actually solve the problem or understand even what the problem is. And that is where I think Taguchi loss function really comes in. Same kind of an example I wanna share would be like in a classroom, if you're talking about the speed at which you're moving through material that you're teaching kids as they're learning about stuff, well, you go too fast, the losses are gonna be students who can't keep up, don't understand, get frustrated and get mad, etcetera. That's on one side.

Langford: And on the other side, you go too slow, you have all the students that really do grasp things quickly and wanna move forward. So understanding that optimum zone, and often times in neuroscience, scientists will sometimes call it the learning zone. That there's a zone or speed that you can go in, but there's another way to optimize learning within the classroom too. And that is, as a teacher to stop managing the pace yourself and let each student learn to manage their own pace. And so now each student is starting to optimize learning based on their pace. Well, the reason we don't do that is if I've got 30 kids in the class and I got 30 kids at different paces, that's a lot more work for me as the teacher, right. Rather than me setting the pace and forcing everybody to work within that. So I would have to learn to manage the system much differently if I'm gonna optimize learning for every child within a classroom or think about a whole school that's optimized like that. Lots of teachers trained and in how to manage like that.

Stotz: Yeah, I was thinking about... I love some of the quotes from Thomas Sowell in America. And he's a wise man and he says, "There's no solutions, only trade-offs." And in a way, I feel like the Taguchi loss function is really kind of the Taguchi trade-off function with loss on both sides.

Whereas a lot of times we think about, there's a specification and that's what we're aiming for. And that's what is really interesting about the Taguchi loss function is that it makes you aware that either way you go, you're gonna have a trade-off. Let's say you could speed up a production process in a factory, but it will impact other processes or that type of thing. So everything is a trade-off.

Langford: Yeah, and it's exactly the same concept, the same thing in a classroom or a learning system as well so...

Stotz: And one other question about that is, you mentioned about optimizing in this case for the parents. Now, you could see that some people... Some teachers in a school might say, "I don't really care about the parents. I wanna optimize for my convenience and I leave for school at 6:00 AM, and I wanna know at 6:00 AM if we're gonna be closed or not, so I don't have to go in." So how does that work? Like you've gotta decide. Also, you talked about optimizing, you could optimize for each individual student versus optimizing for the group of students as a whole. How does someone figure that out when they're in that system?

Langford: Yeah, so that comes back to the constancy of purpose. And that was Deming's number one point out of his 14 points is, "Do you have a constancy of purpose?" And so like for a school, if the constancy of purpose is so that you always have a place to park your car and... You always get out of the building by 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and whether that's individually or written or unwritten within the whole school, you are implementing a constancy of purpose. But if your constancy of purpose is to continually create learning experiences for youth in its day, in order to add value to society, that's a much different purpose. And that means everybody has to be focused on creating those learning experiences and looking at students as if they were in a company. You'd say they would be the customers, but they're the clients or they are the people receiving the service. And the schools that really get it, understand that that's why they exist. They exist only for student learning and no other purpose, and so everything becomes optimized around that purpose.

Stotz: Great. So, maybe I'll just summarize some of the things that I took away from that. I think the first thing is, I kind of see now Taguchi loss function as it's kind of a trade-off, and we can see that the objective is to identify what are you trying to optimize for, and then understanding that deviating away from that on either side will bring loss, and ultimately what you wanna try to do is find the optimum point where that line, that parabola is having the least loss in relation to what is your constancy of purpose. What is the purpose of what you're doing? Anything else you would add to that?

Langford: No, that's exactly right. And I'm sure that there are parents that are listening and they say, "Well, you know, my child's gifted in school and they really like to move fast, and if you sort of optimize the pace, my child is gonna start to be bored." But then there's other ways to think about that, that if you finish everything very quickly, you have a lot of options now, right? You could help somebody else and is somebody gonna bully you if you've been helping them on a daily basis, understand a concept or work through something. You could go ahead at your own speed, you could go faster if you wanna go on, or maybe you're not as good in another subject, and you need to spend that time optimizing the performance in Math or English or something else that you're not as good in. And so I used to always teach students that your job is to optimize your own system, right? And my job is to operate the system... Optimize this system and the superintendent and so on and so forth, all the way up to the whole nation optimizing performance.

Stotz: I wanna just tell a quick story before we wrap up, and that is, I was teaching a finance course and I knew that my students did not understand finance and they were kind of terrified, and so what I had was... I would teach a little bit and then I would give them a practice problem, then I would teach a little bit more and I'd give a little practice problem. And what I did... Here's what I did and tell me what you think of it. So what I did is I basically told the students, I said, "Stand up when you've calculated the answer." So what happened was, after I did the first couple of questions, but first of all, I like to keep students moving just because I feel like make it a little bit more exciting.

So, the students would stand up and you could clearly see that there was a group that would stand up first.

Stotz: So what I then did, is I said, okay, now after assessing this a couple of times, I was able to see that there was five students in the class that were just not getting up really fast. I said, "Okay, now five students come down." It was a big class, it was at a university, and I said, "Okay, you five students come down to the front of the classroom and line up." So they lined up in a line, and then I told the other students, come down and get behind one of these students until we have, let's say, six people in each line. And so the students all came down and they got in line with the one that they know or whatever. And then once they were done, I said, "That's your groups." So the next time that I got, I did the next problem, I had to move around each other, the next time I had the problem, I said, "Okay, solve this problem, whatever team, where every member of the team has finished and you gotta make sure everybody's finished, that team stands up first." And then I tried to use the power of the knowledge of the senior people, or not senior, but the ones that really got it quickly to help the others, and they were helping the others just like what you said.

Langford: Yeah, so what you did is it's the System of Profound Knowledge again, but from a neuroscience standpoint, yes, you're right. Students of any age have to be up and moving, we need that spinal fluid moving up and down their spine and moving back and forth in order to get blood flow going to the brain and everything, so that part's really good. What I probably would have adjusted would, I would have said, "Okay, as soon as you understand this, I want you to stand up and find somebody still sitting down and go explain it to that person and go over it until they understand it, and then now there's two of you that are gonna stand up and you're gonna find somebody else still sitting down. And so you sort of exponentially start everybody in the room, and then the noise level goes up, and the fun level goes up, and then everybody is actually looking for somebody still sitting. And sometimes...

Stotz: And would you do that every time, every time? Let's say you have 20 quiz... Twenty test questions that you're giving them throughout a three-hour time period, let's say. Would you do that each time where you would just say, "Go help whoever's sitting down," or would you eventually allow them to get into groups or not?

Langford: They're gonna get faster and faster and faster. Again, it comes back to your constancy of

purpose. Do you have a constancy of purpose or a meaning about why you want them to get into groups? Are they struggling with group, being able to be in a group and communicate in a group and those kinds... Okay, if that's my purpose that's much different.

Stotz: Which it's not, because one of the unique things about Thais, when I teach them in Thailand is that they're much more comfortable in groups compared to let's say Americans, so they don't need group work. But I also see that what you're telling me, that method will accelerate, the process won't take as long, I think it would accelerate pretty quickly. So alright, well, I would say I learned something from today's lesson and I'm gonna test it out because my purpose for that class, I had 50 people in the class, many of them were very scared of finance, and I said, "I'm gonna get all of you to the level of competence that I want, that's my goal." It is... That was my goal in that class, and so that's part of why I did it that way.

Langford: When you're optimizing it, what you're saying is correct, you're optimizing, 'cause you want every single person to really enjoy... And I have a joy in learning for finance, right?

Stotz: Yeah.

Langford: So how am I gonna get there? What's the quickest way I'm gonna get there? How I'm gonna optimize that?

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, David, on behalf of everyone at Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey.

Stotz: This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, David and Andrew discuss the dreaded standardized tests, including how they evolved, how they're used (and not used) now, and what Deming said about them. David also offers practical tips for educators who want to move away from standardized tests in their classrooms.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, what would Dr. Deming say about today's standardized testing? David, take it away.

Langford: So one of the things when I started learning about the Dr. Deming's field is, there's a lot of people that know about manufacturing, a lot of people know about management, etcetera, a lot of people don't, but everybody knows about education, everybody went to school somewhere, someway, homeschooling, charter schools, whatever it might be, so everybody went to school, so everybody's sort of knowledgeable on that. And one of the things that's pretty common through that process is the emphasis over the last 30 years is of standardized test, as the way to sort of measure, not only the performance of a system, or a teacher or a student individual kind of thing, but also the success of how a nation is doing, right? Can we compare the US to Japan and Australia and Thailand? And where do we rank? And who's 14th? And all these kinds of things. So I just wanna go back a little bit about, where did this evolve? Hundreds of years ago, we didn't have standardized tests, and amazingly people survived, people got jobs, became entrepreneurs, they did all kinds of things, and they didn't have a standardized test scores to be able to rank them, to be able to do stuff.

Langford: So one of the reasons these things did evolve, was a quick and easy way that we could rank individuals or rank systems, and that was one of the things that Deming was most opposed to, ranking people, either through performance appraisals, grades, standardized tests, whatever it might be. So a lot of the purpose of why we do it, is a simple way to rank schools and try to understand, "Well, who's number one? And who's not?" And that kind of a thing. And then the second one...

Stotz: And let me add something there just 'cause I wanna make sure that this comes out clear, is that obviously Dr. Deming was against the idea of ranking, but from a sincere perspective of some leaders out there, they may say, "Well, I'm not using it to rank so much as I'm just using it to figure out where is the trouble spots that I should be focusing on."

Langford: Yeah, maybe you're not doing that, but people that are getting your scores are doing that, I can guarantee it. And then now it's gone to parents looking up scores online and comparing schools even across the street to try to see, "Oh wow, that school has higher test scores than this school, so it must be a better school." Deming had a lot of comments about standardized testing, but one of the ones I remember was, he said our education system would be significantly improved if we could get rid of standardized tests and grading as a performance measure. And it goes back to... We keep talking about the purpose of the system and the constancy of purpose of the system, and so is your constancy of purpose to get good test scores? Is that really the only thing you're trying to accomplish in a school? And if that's the case, you're gonna do all kinds of really, very dysfunctional things in that school to get test scores. Like for instance, well, one of the first things we're gonna cut out is music programs and sports programs, right? 'Cause we don't test us for those, and so we don't need those, we can cut that out, and then we spend more time on this.

Langford: And I know the schools that are now mandating 90 minutes of math a day, whether you need it or not, you're gonna get 90 minutes of math a day and just waste and all kinds of stuff, and then it causes all kinds of crazy stuff within the system. And the tests themselves have slowly started to change, and one of the things that, especially that people used to say when you'd say, "Well, we should get rid of standardized tests." People say, "Well, how do we get people into colleges then? 'Cause they won't have an SAT score and they won't be able to get into college." And I think interesting thing is that there are numbers of universities, they're now throwing those things out and just saying... I know that in California, there's universities that do not require SAT scores any longer to go to the university as a measure of how well you're gonna do.

Stotz: And would just abandoning that and say, "Well, college is open for everyone." Would that be the smart thing to do? Or is it to say, "Well, let's create a system that tries to optimize for something else."? Or does that add a huge amount of complexity for a school that doesn't have a lot of resources, let's say?

Langford: Well, you want my method or do you want... Stotz: I'm only here for you.

Langford: So I don't mind that there should be some kind of a base level, you need to have graduated from a high school, you need to have done certain things, and then all the people that meet that certain baseline that wanna go into college or wanna go on to a particular college, it just goes into a lottery. And now, let's say you have a thousand spots open, so you draw out a thousand names, all those people get to come to your university or your college for that year. Now, if you weren't chosen, you know why you weren't chosen.

Stotz: Pretty clear.

Langford: Yeah, it's pretty clear. And you could put your name in for multiple universities, and if you somehow got drawn for several universities, you could make a choice, "Which one do I really wanna go to?" And you would stop all this crazy stuff about people paying to get their kids in certain universities, and some universities are so expensive that only very rich people can get their kids in those universities and just on and on and on.

Stotz: Yeah, but it could be abused. The legislators or the people in the university would say, "Well, the good news about our student body, David, is that they're all lucky."

Langford: Yeah, that's right. But if you had randomly chosen students at your university and you were still churning out some of the top students in the world in these professions, you're really doing something. You've really optimized the system in some way. On the other hand, if all you're doing is choosing the very best people that are probably gonna be successful at any place they go, you can actually get away with a lot of dysfunctional stuff, and these students are still gonna be successful because they're just gonna overcome any barriers that are put in front of them. So there's no incentive to actually optimize a system moving forward with that.

Stotz: I guess unless you're... If your method... What you're optimizing for is "I just want the top, top, top smartest, smartest as measured by score, young people in the world or in my state, or my city, or my country that's it. That's all I'm up to, man. I'm not trying to bring education to everyone," but that's not what Cal State Long Beach was doing, when I went there, they were trying to bring education to everybody.

Langford: Yeah, so it's much different constancy of purpose of what you're trying to do. The other thing about standardized tests, and we all grew up with multiple choice tests, and I remember one time somebody asking Deming at a conference about that and he paused for a long time and he said, "What do you think about multiple choice questions?" And he said, "It's ridiculous." He said, "I would much rather you have a multiple choice questions which students have to answer: in what circumstances would A and B be correct? And in what circumstances would A and D be correct?

And what would be the system if none of these were correct?" Because that would require thinking, and responses, and deep level understanding of something. But this game is still being played, especially in K-12 to get test scores, teachers are taught to teach children to guess. If you don't know the answer, just guess, because if there's four things there, you got 25% chance that you guessed right. Well, this is ridiculous, because all trying just to get your scores up. So if you really wanna find out if somebody knows something or doesn't, you certainly don't want them just guessing, that's not gonna tell you anything. And maybe 25% of the time they guess correctly, and so you're getting scores that's not telling you anything about the system.

Stotz: I was in a senior level class in my final year in university, taught by an amazing woman who had actually lived in pre-Nazi Germany, and she had just seen communism, fascism and democracy in action, and that was the name of the course. And the final exam was a essay exam, and we went in and it was, I don't know, three hours, and when I got that exam back, it said A plus, and I just felt like I just really, really understood the material, I enjoyed writing that exam and I was proud of what I accomplished. And I can say there's no multiple choice exam that I took that I'm like, "I'm really proud of what I did there."

Langford: Yeah, the same thing. We could all look back at experiences that we had, and usually they don't involve Draconian methods of testing, and standardized tests and things like that. One of the best classes I ever took in college, and I still vividly can recall or remember the name of the class was "The Assassination of American Presidents." And we went through every attempted assassination, everything, all the way up through Kennedy, and on through and analyze Zapruder films, and I don't ever remember a test in that class. Basically he just said, "Nick, if you show up every day, you're gonna get an A. Now let's start learning about this." And he had just amazing love for that whole concept and that whole thing, and that got translated to the students, and there was a waiting list to get into that class.

Stotz: And what do you say to a listener, a teacher who's listening and says, "Yeah, that's easy to do and easy to say for a senior level class or an advanced level class where you've got 15 or 20 students. But I'm teaching a freshman class of 200 students, I don't have the time to read 200 essays," How do you respond to that where they see multiple choice and standardized as kind of a weeding out, a culling, I don't know. How do you respond to that?

Langford: Well, there's lots and lots of different methods, but I would still probably require somebody to write an essay or write an explanation and go through stuff and then bring it to class, and now pass your essay once you left, and that's the person's job is to go through it and give you feedback. And then you're gonna get it back again, and then you're gonna get a chance to correct it and take that feedback, and you can do that multiple times if you want to in the class, because now you're making everybody into a teacher as well. And we all know in a classroom, the person that learns the most is the teacher.

Stotz: I'm gonna explain in a way that I've done something and then give me some critique on it or help with that. I have the valuation master class and when my students get into the advanced levels, I say, "Look, I've taught you everything I know now," and they're valuing companies, "so how much is Apple worth?" And they've gotta go through a whole pretty structured process that I put them through, and then I tell them, "Okay, when you're done, post your results up into the group, and then I'll assign another student to review the process," review what they've done and give them feedback. And then they'll have to revise, and it could be five times before I eventually look at it and give a final review and say, "Okay, here's a one little thing that you missed." And a lot of times I'll figure out, "Oh, I didn't actually teach that part," and it's being exposed because Apple is a very complex company. But the point is that, on the one hand I've been a little bit nervous about to do it because I've also felt like in an academic environment, would they say, "Well, wait a minute, are you just pure scoring or are you as the expert and the professor giving the score," how do you respond to what I'm doing and how could I improve it also?

Langford: Yeah, you have to understand that feedback is much different than rating and ranking, right? So if I write this paper and I hand it in and you give me an A minus or, you know, I might be really happy about that, or I might be just really, totally upset about that because you're ruining my GPA at the university, and it doesn't tell me a darn thing, I have no idea. You can get an A minus in one school and it's a C minus in another school, and it's an A plus in a third school, and its exact same work in all three schools, because of what Deming talked about, the variation within a system, the variability of what goes on with that. Really what you're after is feedback though, the human brain, back to neuroscience, the human brain thrives on immediate feedback, so the faster you can get that feedback to people, the better. Now, if that's peer-reviewed feedback, and that's the fastest way you can do it with 200 students at a class, that's awesome. But I always remember my son in high school was in an advanced English class, wrote a 14-page paper, worked really hard on it in September, got it back in January, and he came home with this paper and it had a grade on it, and he said, "I don't have any idea why we even wrote this thing, I don't even remember anything about it," but I got scored and moved on.

Langford: And if that's all you're after, 14-page paper, check, been there, done that and then let's move on. But if you actually wanna give people feedback, then maybe there's the whole fallacy of a 200-person class is not workable, right?

Stotz: So, in wrapping up the discussion about standardized testing, how should somebody think about it, particularly somebody that's a victim of it or in the middle of it, or being forced to do it. What's your advice?

Langford: Well, all I know is that over the last 40 years after I left high school, basically, nobody ever asked me what my standardized test score was. [laughter] No employer ever wanted to know, nobody did, they just wanted to know, Are you capable of doing the job? Are you capable of doing something? Right? And that score wouldn't have told anybody anything, even if it was a perfect score, chances are, I wouldn't wanna hire that person 'cause all they could do is just be really good at standardized tests, I need somebody with people skills in psychology and understand statistical variation, back to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. So I would much rather our systems were preparing people to be successful in life, rather than preparing them just to take good tests.

And it's not like you can just throw the baby out with the bath water and as a teacher just say, "Well, I'm just not gonna do that anymore. I'm just not gonna test people." But there are ways that you can continually diffuse that for students so that they see it for what it is and move forward. On the other hand, you can also use a standardized test to see as a teacher, how am I doing?

Langford: Countless times I heard Dr. Deming talk about his own classes and he said, "That's what I wanna know, is how am I doing as a teacher?" Like you said, Oh, I forgot to go over certain concepts, and so a standardized test could tell me that 80% of the class didn't get this concept, and I could look back at what I did and say, Oh, no wonder, I didn't even go over that, I didn't even discuss that. So why would I wanna penalize them because I didn't do my job?

Stotz: Right. Let me try to summarize kind of what I took away from this discussion, what you were saying was that there's an emphasis on standardized tests over the past 30 years, kind of thinking maybe how is a nation doing or that score we can use to compare how different schools are doing, how different individuals are doing, and your first thing that you mentioned was, how did we survive in the past, did people learn things in the past without standardize? Of course they did. And so it doesn't mean that this is some kind of solution, and then you said that, this is the interesting part, I felt like when you were saying that it evolved as a way to rank people in systems, but ultimately it will be misused, and that is that somebody is gonna use it for the purposes that it wasn't really meant to be used for. And so it just becomes a dangerous tool. And then we talked about is the purpose to get good test scores? Because if that's what our purposes of our education system then, Yeah, go for it. Let's get the best test score. But that's not really our purpose, we also talked about how we could get people into college, maybe you talked about the random concept that they have to meet certain minimum standards, and then a random, which I found fascinating. I think it would take a lot of guts for an institution to do that, but I do think that there's definitely some interest in that.

Stotz: And then we've kind of ended up talking about feedback and using student feedback when you have a big class or you're trying to teach something at scale and how important it is to get feedback as quickly as possible. And when you were talking, I was thinking about a young person may be more concerned about what their peer thinks about what they're writing about something than the teacher. And you actually may be able to use peer pressure in a sense that they really feel like they gotta write something good, otherwise their friend next to them is gonna go, "What's this crap?" They may get more truthful response, and then finally, you talked about ultimately, our education should be about preparing people for a successful life, is there anything else that you would add to that?

Langford: I don't, you did a really good job of summarizing that up to complex subject. And it can be really fraught with emotion and there may be people listening to us that agree that that's not how we should be judging systems, but they're caught in the system itself, so you may not be able to change the system totally but you can do something. And what is that something you can do Monday morning to sort of optimize learning for the students that you're working with?

Stotz: What a challenge and a great way to end it. You may not be able to change the situation that you're in and the system that you in but you can do something, and the beginning of that something is changing your thinking. And I think that's what we're trying to get at in our discussion. So David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. I'm learning a lot and I know the audience is too. For listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And also, David, what's the best way that someone listening or viewing this can get in touch with you to learn more?

Langford: You can go to my website at langfordlearning.com. And if you go to langfordlearning.com/booklet, you get and download a free booklet that tells you about the services that we provide in our company, so, all Deming based.

Stotz: Fantastic. Well, this is your host Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work," and I'm gonna add learning.

Langford: Learning.

In this episode, David and Andrew discuss going beyond solving problems in schools to preventing them from happening. David also shares a tool for finding the area where optimization of the system would have the greatest impact.

In the episode, David shares his screen with Andrew and fills in a diagram. The beginning version has post-it note images around the sides, and the final version has lines drawn between all the post-it notes. See below:

TRANSCRIPT

Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is: optimization of a system to prevent problems. David, take it away.

Langford: Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be here again. So yes, today I wanted to talk a little bit about just the optimization of the system and what does that mean. So to go back to Deming's System of Profound Knowledge and understanding systems is critical part of the System of Profound Knowledge. And within the System of Profound Knowledge, what is a system? And so there's all that, and we talked a little bit about that in the past, but today I just wanted to talk a little bit about the optimization of the system and what does that actually mean? So it's not a matter of just trying hard. I'm gonna optimize, so I'm just gonna work hard, I'm gonna try hard, I'm gonna get better.

Langford: In fact, Deming was famous for saying that we're being killed by people's best efforts, and in education that runs rampant. He also said that copying can lead to disaster. And just those two phrases probably discounts 80-90% of what goes on in education now, because every time I do a seminar, somebody says, where else is this happening? Or Can I have a copy of that? Or somebody will go and they'll do a presentation somewhere, and everybody will just wanna copy that. So it's a sort of like, no thinking involved, just copy steps one, two, three, and four and things will get better.

Stotz: Cookie-cutter.

Langford: And that... Sometimes that just copying to try to optimize a system is better than doing nothing at all, but it's also a trial and error process. Trial and error is very expensive and very time-consuming, and you have a great chance that you're not going to improve anything, right?

Because systems that were developed at other places, so somebody, some leader comes into a school system somewhere and they do a great job in reading or whatever it might be, because they start studying their system and figuring out a process, and then they decide they're gonna market that to other people. And so you see the results of what they did, but it doesn't take in any understanding of the variation in systems, and you could have variation in schools when they're right across the street from each other. Totally different clientele and makeup of the student body and the staff and background, and all kinds of variation, so it doesn't necessarily work just to copy and apply something that was successful someplace else. Now, it is...

Stotz: And one question about that is that, I guess part of that is because the aim may be different.

If I think about when I was writing research in investment banks, the aim was to write a big, long research report. We had a lot of resources and all that, but when I set up my own firm, my aim was, how do I make this more efficient? And so I created a whole different system with a different aim, and therefore, if somebody wanted to go from my company to work in that company or vice versa, it wasn't like you could just copy what we were doing, there's a whole operating system that we created based upon a different aim.

Langford: Yeah, I remember when I first started things in classrooms with Deming help, and then people would come to visit classrooms and I'd always have the students explain what was going on and what they were doing, and invariably, my kids got really cagey because the visitors would say, "Oh, that's really cool. Can I have a copy of that?" And the kids would say, "Yeah, you can have a copy of it, but it's not gonna do you any good." And they'd say, "What, what, wait, wait, what do you mean?" And they said, "Because you don't understand the theory." So you don't understand what's going on here, and you just think you can just copy yourself to success and it just never works.

Langford: The other problem I see in optimization of systems is that people sort of come in with preconceived ideas about what they think is the problem. In fact, I had a principal at one time in one of the seminars, and he said, "I don't need all those PDSA stuff and tools and process and... I just... What the problem is." And, well, if you have that kind of divine intervention, why would you even come to a seminar on improving schools and learning if you already know, and if you already know it, why haven't you done it? Deming often said, "Well, you've been snoop goofing around for the last 20 years."

Langford: If you're that smart, you should be able... You should have already done it. So I guess seminars I typically try to coach people, I say, "You can come with a list of possible problems and opportunities that you might wanna work on," and therefore, that's why we use the word probletunities, and my students said all of our problems are... All of our problems start looking like an opportunity, and that's a great kinda way to go through life, that, "Okay, we got a big problem and okay it's an opportunity, it's an opportunity, we can make it better. We can do something here".

Stotz: Yeah.

Langford: The problem also shows you the deficit within the system or the problem within the system, and... So I wanted to kinda get into a little bit about, well, how would you go about sort of sorting out what to work on or how to move forward when you're trying to optimize the system. So I'm gonna actually share my screen.

Stotz: Great.

Langford: And I'm gonna take a chance at trying to do a tool here, and we're gonna do... If you're

watching the video, it's pretty simple, but we'll try to explain it with the audio as well as we

go along. But what we're gonna do is what's called an interrelationship digraph, okay? And I've got five common areas here that we often find in schools. Teachers will say things like, "We have a lack of effort around here." Even say, "Students don't understand the concepts." "Oh, the teacher attitudes around here is... They're bad," and, "Oh, we gotta work on the student attitudes. We gotta do something to them until... Make them have a better attitude." And "there's no time to do all these kinds of things."

Langford: So if that sounds like your system and you're starting to think about, "Well, okay, here's all the kinds of problems that we're kinda working on," so what we do here is we pick a color and we start off, we say, "Okay, is there a relationship between lack of effort and don't understand the concept?" And understanding the concepts is really important in neuroscience, that taps into the sense of meaning with people, et cetera. And so you have to say, is there a relationship? And so, usually, we do this in a group, being able to discuss and you say, "Yes, I think there's a relationship." So if you think there's a relationship, you just draw a line between the two.

Langford: There's a second question, which affects which the most. Does our lack of effort affect not understanding concepts, or does not understanding concepts affect lack of effort? And so usually, I get the... People go into higher order thinking, it looks like this, with their mouths open and...

Langford: Because their brain is having to figure out, "Okay, how does that work?" So we have the... Let's say we have a discussion and we decide, "Well, if we understood the concepts, we're probably gonna get more effort out of people, so I'm gonna put an arrow going that way." Then we have a lack of effort and teacher attitudes. Well, is there a relationship? If there is I draw a line. There's not, then I don't draw a line. Secondly...

Stotz: For the viewing... For the listening audience, just to highlight what David's got here, he's got a blank piece of paper with a kind of a circle form. And in the upper right hand corner, it says, "Lack of effort." Just below that, it says, "Don't understand the concept." And at the bottom, it says, "Teacher attitudes," and then on the left side, it says, "Student attitudes," and then in the upper left, it says, "No time," and then you're starting to draw lines connecting these two things to show the relationships. So continue on.

Langford: Okay, so we've decided that lack of effort and teacher attitudes are connected, because if my students had a lot more... Put in a lot more more effort, that would probably affect my attitude as a teacher, I would probably like that. So we're gonna make the arrow going that way. So then we have lack of effort and student attitudes. You have to say, "Are those connected?" What do you think, Andrew?

Stotz: I would say yes, lack of effort and student attitudes? Seems like it would be.

Langford: So if they put in more effort, they probably have a better attitude?

Stotz: It seems to me that, that would be the case, but I don't know. I'm gonna follow your lead. I'm learning, man.

Langford: So we make the arrow go that way. So then we have lack of effort and no time. So I would say yes, those are connected, and so I'd say, "Wow, well, if we were using... If we had more effort going on, we'd probably be making better use of our time." That would be... Or we could say, if we had more time, we could probably have better effort. So sometimes it's a 50/50 kind of proposition. And so I often tell people, if it's 50/50, just flip a coin, because whichever way it goes, if you end up working on one, you win. You work on the other, you win too, so.

Stotz: Right.

Langford: So let's say that no time... Not enough time is affecting our lack of effort. So we've already gotten one time around the circle, and so this is gonna get a lot faster now. And so, now we're gonna go to the next concept in the circle, and then we're gonna go through that in a relationship. So we have "don't understand the concept" and "teacher attitudes." Well, if students understood the concept better, I would say that's probably gonna affect teacher attitude. And then now we have "don't understand the concept" and "student attitudes." I would venture the same thing there, that if they understood the concepts, they're gonna have a better attitude. And how about "don't understand the concept" and "not enough time"?

Stotz: Yep.

Langford: So probably, that's affecting not enough time. Okay. So now we're gonna pick a different color, and we're gonna go to teacher attitudes, and it's getting easier, we're almost there. So now we have "teacher attitudes" and "student attitudes." Here's an interesting problem. Which of that... Well, number one, is there a relationship?

Langford: What do you think, Andrew?

Stotz: It's symbiotic, it feels like to me, but I don't know.

Langford: They're related in some way, right?

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: Yup.

Stotz: I guess if you asked the students, they'll give you one answer, and if you ask a teacher, they'll give you another answer.

Langford: Yeah. So here's a chicken and egg question, which affects which the most? Do teacher attitudes affect student attitudes, or do student attitudes affect teacher attitudes?

Stotz: I would say that ultimately the teacher is the one responsible for making sure that the aim of the classroom is being achieved. So if their attitude wasn't right, it would be very hard for students to get it right. What do you think of that answer, David?

Langford: Yup, I would agree with you. So students are often victims of the system, and they're gonna respond in ways to whatever the teacher's attitude is.

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: So then we have "teacher attitude" and "not enough time" or no time. So I'd say those are definitely connected, 'cause I hear that all the time, "Oh, we don't have enough time to do these things." So I'm gonna draw a line there. Which affects which the most?

Stotz: I think that the reality is we all have not enough time, so the attitude of the teacher probably is the most important thing to resolve the issue of not enough time.

Langford: Yeah. But if you're feeling hurried all the time and rushed and can't get everything done, and that's gonna be affecting your attitude.

Stotz: That's the true.

Langford: Is that what you're saying?

Stotz: Yeah, I mean, if you're overloaded, and you can't achieve what you want to achieve, that definitely will hurt your attitude.

Langford: Okay. And then I... And we just have one last connection, we have "not enough time" and "student attitudes." So I'd say, yeah, those are definitely... I'm gonna draw a line, 'cause

those are connected. Then I have to say which affects which the most. And same thing for students, is, if I don't have enough time to get this assignment done and get it to the level of quality that is being asked for, and maybe I've got that going on multiple other classes, and I'm feeling rushed and pressured, etcetera, that's probably gonna affect my attitude to some degree.

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: You have to draw a line. Okay, so when we get all finished with this in a relationship digraph, we go around, and we simply just count the ins and outs, how many arrows coming in and how many coming out. So for lack of effort, we've got two arrows coming in, and we've got two

arrows going out.

Langford: So I'm gonna just put two-comma-two next to that. For, "Don't understand the concept," we have zero arrows coming in, and we have four arrows coming out, meaning that, that area is affecting four other areas. And then down at teacher attitudes, we've got three coming in, we've got one going out, so a lot of things affect the teacher's attitude. And student attitudes, we've got four arrows coming in, and we've got zero going out. And now, with "no time", we've got one coming in and three coming out. So when we get all finished with this, what we try to look at is, we wanna think about in optimizing a system, what are we gonna work on that's gonna give us the very biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, right? 'Cause we... All of us, no matter if you're in business or school... Education or whatever, you only have so much time and money to do things, right?

Langford: And so we look for the area that has the most arrows coming out of it. And in our simple little example here, that's, "Don't understand the concept." So if this was a school I was working with, and these are the five key areas that... Complaints or problems that they identified, I would be pushing them to say, "Look, start working on teaching concepts better, ways that kids can understand the concepts," etcetera. And if you do that, teacher's gonna have a better attitude, student's gonna have a better attitude. They're gonna make more efficient use of their time, and they're gonna put in more effort.

Stotz: Fantastic. That... And that's very clear. For the listeners out there, it's a diagram with a lot of arrows going in and out of the different topics. But ultimately, what's very clear is there's one topic, "Don't understand the concept," that is impacting a lot of other things, and therefore it appears as though that is the one that should be worked on.

Langford: Yeah. The big "aha" on this too is that, what... Traditionally, where do schools spend their time? They spend their time trying to improve student attitudes, or they're gonna spend their time trying to improve teacher attitudes. And it's especially relevant now coming out of the pandemic, because across... At least across the US, I'm sure it's probably world-wide, that teachers are feeling really overwhelmed, and now they have all this video stuff to work with, and they still don't have all their students coming back, and there's all kinds of issues and problems and stuff going on. And so we need to do things to improve teacher attitudes, right? We need to have some teacher parties and maybe have a Teacher of the Year Award and those kinds of things to try to improve people's attitudes. And it's not understanding where attitude is coming from the system itself. Deming talked about that anywhere from 94-98% of the effects of the system are coming from the system itself. And if you're not addressing that, you're not doing anything.

You're just spinning your wheels, and next year you're gonna have just as depressed of teachers as you do this year. And so, then what are you gonna do? Well, we're gonna have to have more pizza parties, and we're gonna have to have other kinds of ways to sort of bribe people into feeling better about the... Their situation, "Oh, I feel better about being in a horrible school," kind of the situation.

Stotz: Right. And it feels like the idea of changing into a very, very comfortable chair from a very uncomfortable chair on the Titanic.

Langford: Yeah, that's right.

Stotz: Fantastic. But let...

Langford: And what Deming said, I think one time at a seminar, was that, pretty soon you're only left with the people who can't get a job someplace else.

Langford: Because all the people that could go some place else and work are gonna... We're gonna get out of here, 'cause nothing ever gets better year after year after year, but we're having these wonderful parties and everything, but that only lasts a little while.

Stotz: Yeah.

Langford: So it kind of leans us back into the discussion of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivations, and so these types of tools help people spend their time wisely working on an opportunity that could actually have a significant benefit.

Stotz: Right.

Langford: But sometimes when I do this with groups in schools as special aid, we get all finished and people will say, "But we don't wanna work on that. That's hard."

Stotz: And there's the secret.

Langford: Yeah, because... And that's what happens, is that we often work on the things that are really easy, right?

Stotz: Yup.

Langford: We don't wanna work on something that's really hard and difficult, nut to crack, right? It's much easier just to do this thing over here and wave the magic wand and then wish we had better students, or better teachers, or better parents, or...

Stotz: Well, it's definitely a road to competitive advantage in the business world if you take on hard projects, because you know majority of people won't do it, and therefore you can achieve another level and basically not be attacked from your competitor. I wanna summarize what I took away and then maybe you add in a little bit and we'll wrap it up. So first of all, we're talking about optimization of a system to prevent problems. You talked at the beginning about, it's not just

about trying harder. You also talked about the idea of copying can lead to disaster as Dr. Deming had said, you know that you could... You're bringing something that works for one system into another, and no systems are identical or even close maybe in some cases. The next thing you mentioned about was best efforts, which Dr. Deming said, "We're being killed by best efforts, and it's not enough. It's the right effort put to the right problem," which then brought us to your discussion about viewing problems in a positive light and seeing them as opportunities. And finally, you went through the interrelationship diagram to help us identify what particular problem of many is having the biggest impact or the most detrimental impact on the organization, and a

tool to identify that, and then to identify that: "Okay, that's where we're gonna focus." Anything else you would add to that?

Langford: That's well done, Andrew, you were paying attention.

Stotz: Yes, I sometimes have a blank stare, ladies and gentleman, but actually I am trying my best to listen and learn, and in fact I...

Langford: No, that was an excellent wrap up.

Stotz: Yes. Fantastic. Well...

Langford: So, I would say, yeah, just to wrap it up, the optimization of a system, in Deming's Profound Knowledge he also talks about, you have to have a theory. What's your theory, theory of knowledge? Well, is your theory optimization of a system? So you kind of see how all these things start to work together to make things happen, and so if I have that constantly in the back of my head, "How am I gonna optimize the system?" So you and I have been working on trying to optimize the podcast system, and we've gotten better microphones and better cameras, and better lighting, and we just keep working because it's a continual improvement, right? As soon as we think we've got it better, then there's probably gonna be a better camera that comes out, or something better, and you have to think about...

Stotz: David, I got a little depressed when you said that trial and error can be really expensive, I think we definitely got some trial and error going on here.

Stotz: Well, let's wrap it up. On behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, David, I wanna thank you again for this discussion, and for listeners: remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. Now, this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I wanna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

With nearly 2 million students not returning to schools and educational institutions after COVID, David and Andrew explore the question "how do we create quality education systems so students are excited to come to school - and stay there?"

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.8 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host, as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming today. I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Lanford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education. And he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is, "Quality is not your problem, it is the answer to your problem." David, take it away.

0:00:30.4 David P. Lanford: [laughter] Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be back again.

0:00:32.6 AS: Great to be with you.

0:00:33.8 DL: So and thinking about this topic, we want to think about what is quality in education and just some of the stats that are coming out in the United States alone, something like 1.3 million students have not returned to the school systems after the pandemic. So.

0:00:56.2 AS: That's unbelievable.

0:00:58.0 DL: The public school systems.

0:01:00.4 AS: Right.

0:01:00.5 DL: And, the stat I heard in the universities is they're down 600,000 students from where they were two years ago before the pandemic. So...

0:01:09.4 AS: So we're talking about almost 2 million students not coming back?

0:01:13.9 DL: That's right. So there's the pandemic caused a lot of systemic shifts. Some of them good, some of them not so good, but it also pointed out a lot of glaring issues that were going on and... In trust in the system, so to speak. And when parents started to find out what was going on with these Zoom meetings online and what a class was like, and the quality of the education and what was going on, many of them just started to make decisions about why should I keep sending my child [laughter] to a school like that if that's what they're gonna do. I was listening to a sports channel just a couple of days ago, and there were just the two guys that were on the channel, discussing sports in the morning. Well, one father was really upset because he said it's the last week or week and a half of school, and all my child is doing is watching movies in almost every class.

0:02:20.4 DL: And granted that it's the end of the school year and they're wrapping up and they're doing things at the end of the school year. But when the kids come home and mom or dad says, "Hey, what did you do at school today?" And they say nothing, which is a very common answer. We tend to think, "Oh, it is just... Oh, they're just kids, they are just kids and just can't remember," etcetera, but that's really not the case. In a lot of cases, there is nothing going on. And so when parents figured out that, okay, I could either do homeschooling. I could send my child to private school. I could go to a charter school, there's a whole lot of the other options there that I can explore and we could actually make this happen.

0:03:15.2 DL: And is that a better experience? Is it a better quality experience? So the topic today about so many schools are not worrying about the quality of what they're doing and they want to start just trying to force parents to get kids back into schools or the same way at the universities, not making a shift in what it is they're doing and just expecting that, oh, well, these students are just gonna come back. But another shift, I think systemically since this is about Deming and education and the system, is that a lot of students during the pandemic didn't go to college and they found out there's some really high paying jobs out there now [chuckle], and you don't need a college degree. And why would I... And since college is attached to debt now, so why would I incur a huge amount of debt and end up with a job that pays less than what I could make if I don't go to college? So that...

0:04:19.5 AS: It's a world turned upside down. It seems like, and one of the questions I had too about this was that, what is the aim of the public education system? Because on the one hand the people who can abandon the public system and do homeschooling or do a charter school or a private school or whatever. Yeah. I mean, they're not gonna worry about those people that can take care of themselves, but majority of people do not have the means to do that. And so it makes me think, what is that aim and how does quality come into play here?

0:04:58.2 DL: Well, another shift that's happening, especially in the United States is that all of a sudden these parents started coming to school board meetings and showing up in droves, and starting to demanding changes. And it's really interesting that the public education system especially is not used to having customers, right. And so they... When I first started doing training in education, especially with talking about Deming principles, etcetera, etcetera, I actually got a lot of pushback, well, we don't have customers and we don't have this. And even just using that word in education kind of still drive some educators crazy. Like I even had people come up to me and say, I got into education, so I wouldn't have to have customers.

[laughter]

0:05:53.9 DL: So that whole thinking, and if you think about a systems diagram from a Deming perspective about inputs into the system, the system itself, and then what the system produces and how that affects, and then the innovation that you get on the upside and that cycle of continually going through that, so much of the education system, especially public education right now is just lagging behind and the longer they wait to get on board and really to understand Deming principles on how to actually transform a system, the longer it's gonna take them to actually sort of catch up with what's happening.

0:06:40.4 AS: And when you talk about that systems diagram, Dr. Deming outlined that in, Out of the Crisis as is one of the places, I remember that, seeing that diagram when I first started studying Deming and it was interesting, but what was very interesting about it was that there was a feedback loop through the customer and the sales and marketing that then came back into the system, and I wonder if that feedback loop has been broken in public education, and as you said, with the parents coming in to the... Give the feedback.

0:07:12.5 DL: Well, I've spent 30 years teaching school districts how to proactively go out and find out what do parents want, and especially what do students want instead of just thinking that, "Oh, I'm just gonna decide and I'm gonna tell you what you want." And you have no other options. So this is... You're just gonna have to put up with it, and that's the way it is. But when you actually go out and it's the same thing that happened with corporations when they started understanding Deming and starting out to actually ask customers what they want. "What do you want in your automobile, or what do you want in your copy machine or... " I remember an executive for Xerox Corporation said that when they met Deming, they thought they had a shelf life of about two years left, or they were gonna go out of business because the Japanese were making and selling copy machines at a profit cheaper than what Xerox could make them. So you don't have to have much math, maybe about a third grade math degree to figure out that if we keep doing what we're doing, we're not gonna be here someday, and I think that the education system is in the same place as well.

0:08:41.7 AS: And when you talk about this idea that quality is the answer, tell us more about what is that answer. How would you describe that answer?

0:08:51.7 DL: Well, we talked a lot about the other in the previous podcast about joy in learning, and when you start concentrating on the quality of what you do and how that affects people, then you get a much different feeling, or end user experience for people. You really think about what's going on with that and following that all the way through. So what are you gonna do in the school system when that child comes home at dinner and mom and dad says, "What did you do at school today?" Are they gonna have an answer for that and are they gonna be excited about it? And if they're all of a sudden really excited about it and say, "Oh, today, we got hit by lightning at science class. It was so awesome studying static electricity and this is what we did and... " Or you don't even have time to ask that question because they're just kinda bubbling over about their experiences and what they did in school that day.

0:09:56.2 AS: Right.

0:09:58.4 DL: That's a different level of quality learning experience. So you think about the purpose again. We have talked about the purpose of education is to create learning experiences for youth in its day or its future in order to add value to society. So is what's happening at school really translating into students being more productive and more capable and being able to go on and to do things at a much higher level? Well, any system that's concentrating on that level of quality, you're not... You're gonna be able to attract students because the word of mouth would just be unbelievable.

0:10:45.2 AS: Right. One of the things that I... One of the fun things about Deming is that you can read the same material and go deeper every time, and one of the things that I started to really go deeper on a while ago was just this idea that in some ways I felt... I didn't really feel or understand it completely, but it was just this obsession that if you could consistently improve quality, it's like you would solve almost every other problem. Now, he's not talking about quality by some objective standard. He's talking about quality in relation to the customer's desires and needs and demands, but if you could continue to improve quality with the customer as the focus, it would solve pretty much everything else and that, I just kind of didn't get. I got the idea when I was younger. Like, change the way you think and systems thinking is up, but this obsession we're just continually improving was something that I just didn't catch. How does that apply to education... And am I right in what I'm saying, first of all? And number two is how do you see that for education as we wrap up on this idea about talking about quality as the answer to the problem?

0:11:56.8 DL: Well, I'll never forget one of the first times I went to Argentina and I was doing a breakout session at some conference that they had there, and they had a lot of educators, both from the university level and from the public schools and staff were in the audience and everything. And so I was just talking out to them about just what you're saying, this idea about continual improvement, and I'll never forget this guy that spoke English pretty well. He said... He just stood up all of a sudden and said, "All you Americans, you're always trying to improve things. Why don't you just leave things alone?"

0:12:35.5 DL: And I was just, I just was just stunned by that. I always thought you came to a conference on improving the quality of education, but you wanna argue for doing nothing. In a system that's clearly failing your country and it, so this deep seated attitude and, and it is a hard thing, continual improvement to think about, oh, I have to continually keep thinking about this. [laughter] Kind of a weird concept when you think about it, right. That you sort of think about. So when you apply it to the education, I remember when I first became a teacher, some, one of the veteran teacher said, "Oh, you're gonna have kind of the... Pretty rough couple of years, maybe three years, the first three years till you get all your lesson plans figured out and all of your tests and everything else. And then after that, it's pretty easy."

[laughter]

0:13:34.9 AS: After that you can coast.

0:13:36.4 DL: Right. And that's a pretty common thing that went on in schools and stuff that... I remember a story, one time, of a university that the students in a sorority or a fraternity, I think it was, had been swiping all of the tests from professors at this university for a period of something like 12 to 15 years. And they finally found this one professor that after like 12 years started reusing some of the tests from 12 years ago. And they, they were so smug that they now had the answers to this guy's test. They'd never been able to... They knew he was gonna repeat at some point, but [laughter] and I think that's a really interesting example of people that are not in a continual improvement, adaptive mode.

0:14:33.0 AS: And I think that, one in, in my kind of wrap up of this to think about the answer to your problem, that quality is the answer to your problem, I think about the inspiration that continual improvement brings. To see yourself bringing more value to your customer, or to your student and developing that and improving that, and testing that, to me is joy in work. So maybe you can wrap this up by summarizing what you feel like the audience should get away from this concept of quality is not your problem, it is the answer to your problem.

0:15:12.4 DL: Well, when you concentrate on that than the quality of... If learning is the aim in a school system, and you're concentrating on how do we create the highest quality learning possible? So then you start to think about, well, how do I become a better teacher? Well, if my mode of operation is, you know, lecture kind of thing, and kids taking notes, and so what am I gonna do? Am I gonna go learn to talk faster so I can cram more stuff in quicker? And that's where neuroscience comes in and tells us no, that you're just gonna put more people to sleep. And, but you might come out of that experience feeling really good, like you actually did something, but did they actually learn something? Was there... Was the quality of their learning better just because you became more efficient at what you did? I mean, you were able to flip through your slides faster in that process... So thinking about the quality of education, you have to think about, well, what does that mean? And what am I gonna do? I wanted students to have maximum ownership in everything that they did. From the time they came in the door till the time they left, we were maximizing their ownership, because what... When you have that control, you also have that learning that goes deep within your brain. And it's not just here today and gone tomorrow.

0:16:50.0 AS: Fantastic. Well, on behalf of everybody at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion, and that concludes another great discussion. I want to remind everybody to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming."People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode of our special Deming in Education series, David and Andrew talk about the difference between "continuous" and "continual" improvement - and how that applies in classrooms.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I am continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is: Should we be continually improving or continuously improving? David, take it away.

0:00:30.6 David Langford: Thanks Andrew. So some people say it's semantics and it doesn't make that much difference to how you think about it. And I think in the last podcast, we were talking about how people have trouble with the idea about continual improvement anyway. But the first person I ever heard really talking about the difference between continual improvement and continuous was Dr. Deming. And not only did he talk about it in his Deming way, he was pretty emphatic about it. And it took me a long time, I'd say 10 years or more, to start to really get it and understand the difference and what that means. But basically the difference is if you have some function of what it is you're trying to do, some program, some process, a manufacturing thing, a classroom or whatever that might be, and you're doing that process over time, continuous improvement means that you're just continuously changing things over and over and over and adapting and moving forward and changing forward. It sounds like a really good idea until you think about it.

0:02:01.5 DL: I don't think it's actually possible to do it unless you're in some kind of a mechanical machine world or maybe artificial intelligence kind of a world where changes are just constantly being made, adaptations and changes moving through. When you're working in systems like education, which is primarily a human system field, and yes, we have computers and technology and things coming into the education system now, but it's still primarily a human system, and my experience is that humans, whether thats students, teachers, parents, whoever, cannot adapt to continuously changing everything. Such like change upon change, upon change, upon change, upon change or sometimes you hear your teachers say, "What's the flavor of the month?" They don't really understand why they're changing anything, they just know that somebody up above is just changing it, then they're just going on with it.

0:03:08.6 DL: Whereas when you have a continual improvement kind of environment, Deming taught us about, you let the system run basically, because you have to understand the data, what is the system producing, and once you understand that data, understand the variation in the system, then you can do a PDSA process and Plan-Do-Study-Act and come up with a small trial method to figure out what could I change to get a significant difference in the system, and then start applying that in a larger and larger scale level. On human systems, those things take time, because it's the psychology of the people in the system, and you have to persuade people that what to do and etcetera, sometimes it can take... And especially in education, it could take years to make a transformation system like that, so people have to learn to, okay, we've gotten to a certain point.

0:04:17.5 DL: We're getting a certain level of quality. And you can measure that, anything you wanna measure that with. You can measure that in attendance records, you could measure that in test scores, you could measure that in happiness of students, you could measure that in happiness of parents or doesn't matter whatever you want. But once you get that baseline data and you start to understand it, and then you have to say to yourself, "Well, am I happy with what's happening now?" I always joke with the teachers, if you're happy and you know it, then clap your hands. You have to get to a state of equilibrium basically. You've changed, and so now you're not happy with the level of quality and you want to see a higher level of quality.

0:05:14.1 AS: So let me try to clarify for the listeners and for myself, the first thing that you're talking about is if you use the word continuously, it implies that you're continuously or constantly changing things. And that's not the objective. The objective is actually to stabilize things to some extent.

0:05:34.4 DL: Change for the sake of change. We're just changing stuff.

0:05:38.6 AS: I wanna see a continuous... Continuously changing systems here. No, that's not what we're after. And then when you mentioned about continually, then you talked about let the system run, the objective is to understand what's the output of the system by letting it run and letting it define itself as to what it's producing and then making a decision, do we take it to the next level, do we take it to or do we leave it at this point and say, "Okay, that's good enough for what we need for the ultimate aim of the system."

0:06:14.3 DL: I find it really interesting in some cases sad and disheartening that you have state systems, especially like in education and state legislators, and they just come up with new rules and regulations, and they have no idea about what the current capacity of the current system is or what the problem is. I'll give you an example. I was working in a district one time and they had an average of 94% attendance rate, I think at the high school, and all of a sudden, the superintendent came out with an edict said that they should be no less than 96%.

0:07:00.0 DL: Well, if you understand systems from a Deming perspective, you actually do want students to stay home at certain times, right? You don't want them coming to school when they're sick, and if you make the parameters so difficult that your life is gonna be terrible if you stay home, now you're gonna have kids come and they're sick, and now you're infecting hundreds and hundreds of kids, and now you got hundreds of kids not coming to school 'cause they're sick, because you are over-emphasizing this. On the other hand, in a continual improvement kind of environment, if you decide that, okay, we can do better, we wanna improve our attendance rate, well, then you have to start studying the quality of what you do, what's causing people not to show up or not to come when they can.

0:08:00.8 DL: Or if sickness is the number one problem, what can we do about it? I once worked with a school in Brazil, and they went to work on their attendance rate, found out that a lot of it had to do a sickness and everything else, so they changed their whole system, they put in more wash stations throughout the entire school. They set up all kinds of times for kids to come in and they wash their hands, and every time they came in from recess or interacting, they had a process where they went through the wash hands, they had signs up with flow charts that said, "This is how you wash your hands." There's actually a process to that or through that. Well, their sickness rate just went down to practically nothing because they put in processes and methods and stabilize the system at a much higher level, and so then most of the kids being absent due to sickness, were the new students that were coming in, and so it would take them some time to get figured out, "Oh, this is what we do around here, and this is why we do it, and everything." Change the system, you get a different result. Instead of what we've been taught to do is leave the system alone and then manage the dysfunction that it produces.

0:09:24.2 AS: And I think that Dr. Deming realized that you have limited resources.

0:09:30.3 DL: Yes.

0:09:30.9 AS: And so you've got to prioritize, and once you've gotten something to a point... And he also realized there's no perfection and there's no reason to go towards perfection, if that's not serving the ultimate customer. I was also thinking about... I was thinking about a way for me to think about this, so I wanna propose this and see what you think, David. So if it's continuously improving, when you say continuously, it means you're kind of demanding constant change, so you could think of the person that the boss saying, "Don't just stand there, do something." And when it comes to continually improving, you're trying to let the system run, make the decision if you're gonna go to the next level of quality, and therefore the person at the top is saying, "Don't just do something stand there."

0:10:21.4 DL: Yeah.

0:10:23.5 AS: Perfect.

0:10:24.3 DL: Think, study the system, start to understand what's going on, what are you actually trying to do, and do you really understand. We're talking about attendance, but do you really understand why students don't wanna come to school, and then are you actually working on those things or you just, "We are gonna punish them if they don't come to school. That's what we'll do." And so two tardies equals an absence and four absences equals this and 12 absences, you lose credit, and so schools put in the layers upon layers upon layers of these punishments and the crazy thing is, it doesn't work, never has worked. If it worked, we wouldn't have any students missing school, because we have these wonderful systems that prevent kids from missing school at all. What do you do as different? We were talking about quality as the answer to your problem, well, when you have a much higher level of quality experience going on in the classroom, and that's happening in every single classroom with every single teacher, and the joy level is really high, you actually have the opposite problem with attendance, you're actually encouraging people to stay home when they are sick, not to come. You actually tell parents, "Look, I know they're really excited," but that's a whole different problem to have, than to think all we gotta coerce these kids into coming and punish them into compliance and reward them into things.

0:12:04.6 DL: There is a school district that set up... I think they're still doing it today. Even set up a reward, the local car dealer said that for any child that is not... Doesn't miss a day of school for 12 years they get a new car. Again, it sounds like a great idea till you think about it, and I think the first year that I saw they filmed it and it was on the local news, and everybody's all excited, and local businesses are supporting education and isn't this great? And isn't this wonderful? Only problem was there were about 10 kids that had perfect attendance for 12 years.

[laughter]

0:12:46.4 DL: And the guy at the car dealership says, "Woah, woah, wait a minute, I'm not donating 10 cars." So now they've got a whole different promise so what they do, well, they gave all 10 of these students a car key and then you went out and you got in a new car, and if yours started, then you were the one that got the car. So, the TV station films the one kid that and their parents and oh, the excitement isn't as great and that. When in the background, you see nine other students...

0:13:20.6 AS: Nine disappointed.

0:13:21.9 DL: Mad, disappointed, kicking themselves, "Stupid, stupid, stupid. I did all that effort and everything else came to school when I was sick and everything else for this vague promise." But none of that's gonna change the system because when you stop doing all that stuff, the system goes right back to what it was designed to do.

0:13:45.7 AS: Yeah.

0:13:47.0 DL: What it was created to do. And that's what Deming's talking about. Once you understand that, okay, now let's go about figuring out what are we gonna do about this, what do we wanna change? And is and what you're saying, too, is attendance your number one problem? And sometimes I'll say that it's administrators in schools and say, "Well, it's a big problem around here. We know it's a big problem." Well, okay, what are all your other big problems?

[laughter]

0:14:16.8 DL: And is this the number one thing? And is this interrelated with everything else you're doing, right?

0:14:23.7 AS: Yeah.

0:14:24.2 DL: And maybe the number one problem is the actual learning experiences in classrooms not engaging, and not fun, not interesting, not relevant, not timely, right?

0:14:37.7 AS: Yep.

0:14:38.5 DL: And sometimes I'll have administrators say, "Well, yeah, but we don't wanna work on that. That's hard."

0:14:44.9 AS: Yeah.

0:14:46.3 DL: It is a lot easier just to have a new car for showing up to school on time.

0:14:51.0 AS: Yeah, we'll figure that out when we get to the end of the year. David, you've reminded me of a story that I tell about when I was the head of research at a research operation here in Bangkok. And we got a new boss that came in and he came in from outside of Thailand, and he basically went to one of our first meetings in the morning. We met every morning at 7:00 AM to present to our sales force. And one of the analysts on my team came in a little bit late, maybe 15 minutes late, and my new boss pulled me aside and he says, "I do not accept people coming in late for meetings, and I want action." And I said to him, "That guy was up until 1:00 AM last night working on what he had to present to the clients today." And so it was my decision as a manager to not go off on the fact that he was 15 minutes late.

0:15:47.7 AS: Now, if you tell me that we have to do that, I'm just telling you, you're gonna lose all that extra joy that he had. And he was determined to work until 1:00 AM to get it done. But you'll find him saying, "Okay, I'll leave at 5:10 also." And so, I couldn't really get my boss to understand that, but I saw that part of my objective was to get the maximum out of what was potential that was there. So, you know, that was just a story that happened in my life.

0:16:19.3 DL: Yeah, you reminded me the first time I got the chance to work at a whole school level. The superintendent said, "Well, we have a tardy problem, you know kids being late to classes." And so we went to work on the tardy problem. And it's really funny because when I did some work in Australia and I mentioned to them that tardy problem, they didn't even know what a tardy was. You mean I said, "Well, it's students being late to classes. It's a big problem in the US and we work on it and we do all those kind of stuff." And I said, "Don't you have that problem here?" And they said, "You mean the teachers being late?"

[laughter]

0:16:58.8 DL: That whole different worlds and whole different systems going on. But I played all kinds of games trying to figure out this whole tardy system. And I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna go back and ask the students, what do you think is the number one... What's the number one reason that people are tardy that are late to class?"

0:17:18.0 AS: And they said it's boring as hell.

0:17:20.6 DL: Well, the number one thing came back, almost 80% of students said classes don't start on time. And I thought, "That's fascinating." Because you could put a whole group of teachers in a room for a month and just say, "What are all the reasons that students are late?" And they're not gonna come up with, "Classes don't start on time."

0:17:42.7 AS: Definitely not. Definitely not.

0:17:43.8 DL: The second highest thing was even if it does start on time, it's boring. It's not relevant, it's not boring or it's not... So if you think of it from their perspective, am I gonna put in effort, get to school on time for something that is not gonna start on time anyway? And I'll always ask teachers, I say, "What do you do in the first 10 minutes of class?" Well, I'm passing out papers and taking roll, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. That's what students are talking about. Nothing towards learning is actually taking place, right? Then that system. So if you really wanna make an impact on the tardy system, all right, teach everybody how to start classes immediately, and then make sure that it's immediately relevant, interesting...

0:18:30.8 AS: With value.

0:18:31.5 DL: And engaging. And guess what? You're not gonna have a tardy problem, and you're not gonna have to have a tardy czar in the front office counting tardies. And you're not gonna have to have penalties and rewards and all the other systems that go with that. That kind of bring us back to our topic today is about continuous improvement or continual improvement. You have to get to a point where you start to say, "Okay, our tardies system is not working. Therefore we need a continual improvement. We need a PDSA cycle, study this system to figure out what we can learn. Then we'll make a change, then we'll let it run and maybe we'll let it run forever. Maybe we'll reach a point where we say we think good is good enough." With a system like that, I can put up with somebody. I remember I told the teachers at one time that, "Okay, at this school there's no such thing as a tardy anymore."

0:19:33.7 DL: And somebody said, "Well, what do we do if somebody's late?" And another teacher said, "Maybe we should just get them caught up." Hey, oh, I see your late and oh, let's get you caught up. Instead of spending time berating them and putting tardy marks and all these kinds of stuff in books and sending it to the front office and all the data and everything else. Hey, you must have missed something really great, right? So let's spend some time get you caught up with this. And so you change this system, change your attitude, change your system, and you're gonna get a different result. Rather than what we taught to do is we try to manipulate the system.

0:20:17.3 AS: Yeah. And unlike in the world of business, you can't force compliance, you can't force people to buy your products, it's voluntary exchange. So I wanna just wrap up and review what you've talked about. So first thing is you talked about the fact that education is, it's a human system. And human systems can't adapt to continuous change. And that's where you're highlighting to us the idea of it's not about continuous change because continuously changing implies that you're changing almost for the sake of change, and that's where I said, don't just stand there, do something. Instead, what you're telling us is focus on continual improvement. And let the system run, understand that there's times that you're gonna wanna just leave it where is and focus in another area. Is there anything that you would add as we wrap up?

0:21:21.3 DL: No, it's absolutely true. You know, we talk a lot about systems and everything else, but I think one of the breakthroughs that I had was when I started this process with students is to get students to think about, you are your own system, you are the top of your system, right? And so if you wanna see a different result in what you're doing, you have to think of yourself in the very same way. I can do a PDSA cycle on why am I habitually late in morning? Okay.

0:21:50.7 AS: That would be a learning process.

0:21:51.8 DL: To use Deming to go through that process and change myself within that and get a different result. And what would that be like?

0:22:01.4 AS: Yeah. And I think for young people, as I always say, they say to me, I have a problem waking up early. I said, you probably have a problem of going to sleep early. [laughter] Alright, well, David, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for our discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz. And I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, that is, people are entitled to joy in work.

David and Andrew's discussion of how using Deming in the classroom not only inspires achievement it also creates collaboration among excited students.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford where we explore Deming's thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is "By what method?" David, take it away.

0:00:28.9 David Langford: Great. So in previous broadcasts, we've talked a lot about deadlines and processes, and operational definitions and quality standards and all kinds of things like that. So today I wanted to talk about, "By what method?" Dr. Deming tattooed that on my forehead, because so many times people would propose things to him and he would say, "By what method?" in his Deming voice. It's all about the method of what it is you're going to do. So what I learned to do is, instead of trying to calculate, "Is this a 92 or an 88 or 88.1?" and then I got the student upset with me, and then because I gave them an 89, I messed up their GPA, and now, so now they're not gonna get a scholarship, and now Mom and Dad is mad at me and it just goes on and on and on. And so, instead of trying to improve that process, I started working on a method to completely get out of it, and especially today, especially in K-12, lots of schools are trying to go to what they call standards-based grading, where they want all students to achieve, but unless... If you start applying a new theory like that, but you keep it in the old system for the last several hundred years, you're gonna have problems.

0:02:08.0 DL: So I had to figure out how can I do that? What can I do? Well, over time it slowly evolved into a process where if somebody turned in an assignment and it met or exceeded the standard for the assignment, then I started to say, "Well, you got that one", to kids and students. Well, that finally, I started to realize, well, why can't that just be my grade book? Either you got a one, which signifies that on this assignment, you did it to standard and you did everything required and you got a one, or it's just blank. If it's just blank, it means you still have to keep working on it to get a one.

0:02:57.9 AS: Just to clarify that. When you say met or exceeded, that's one statement, that's not saying met is one thing and exceeded is another. Is that correct?

0:03:06.3 DL: That's right.

0:03:07.2 AS: Okay.

0:03:07.3 DL: Because yes, we have a quality standard with this assignment, but I may be really interested in this, and so I did a whole bunch more than was required. Right? And so, I still wanna recognize that with students, "Look at, look at this, look what this. You did this and you went above and beyond the standard." Right?

0:03:27.8 AS: Right.

0:03:28.3 DL: So you still get a one for doing that, and I'm not gonna take away your desire to go above the standard by giving you A+++ or all kinds of games that teachers play. You got that one, which is awesome, and the rest is just joy and learning for you. Or if you went above the standard, okay, I might give you a chance to share what you did with the rest of class.

0:03:58.6 AS: That's what I was just thinking about. Yeah.

0:04:01.8 DL: Yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna ask you, "Would you be willing to share this?" I'd say, 99% of the time, kids said, "Yeah, yeah, I'd be glad to share this." And I would say the same thing to them. "Okay, but when you share what you did and the level you took this to, I want you to describe by what method did you do that."

0:04:23.2 DL: And it was so fascinating because students would say, "You know, this is what I did, and this is my project, and this how it turned out, and I'm really proud of it and everything... " Okay, by what method did you do that? "Well, I set aside 10 minutes every day just to work on this project." And amazingly, you'd see other students in the class go, "Oh, that's how they did that. They weren't just smart." Right? Because the traditional system pegs people like that. You got smart kids and the not so smart kids, right? And kids start to learn, "Well, she's just a lot smarter. So that's why she could do that." No, she had a method. Right? She may be smart too, she may have a preponderance of neurons in that part of her brain that just helps her be really good in that area. I also bet that person had a method that got him to that level, and if I give them a chance to share that method, other people can learn from that.

0:05:29.5 AS: Can I go back? Just take a step back and talk about when Dr. Deming said, "By what method?" Let's just talk briefly about what he meant by that, because sometimes, you know, we have scrutiny, let's say in management, in companies, by saying, "I don't want you to hit your goal by doing something unethical. You've gotta live up to our values. So if that's your method, don't do it. But any other method, I don't care." Right? So we oftentimes think "by what method" only applied maybe to the ethical behavior of an employee, but why is Deming saying, "By what method?"

0:06:05.6 DL: Well, you have the same thing in education. Why do we have cheating in education? And then, teachers start spending all their time trying to catch the cheaters, right? So they come up with all tricks and even when taking SAT tests and national tests, right, "We have to space them four feet apart and we have to do this, and we have to have it timed, and you have to have to work this, because we have to catch the cheaters, and that's our job because we think are our job's inspectors", right? Well, when you start to take all of that out and saying, "Well, no, that's not my job. My job is to set up the environment and the system in such a way that you can achieve, and if you don't get it to the level I want you to get to, what's gonna happen, well you're gonna get help". Novel idea. And in some cases, you're gonna get a lot of help and it's gonna be pretty intense feedback that it turns out, in neuroscience, that in order for you to switch on basic, your learning genes, you need intense and immediate feedback on stuff. So the quicker I can get you feedback on stuff, the more likely are, you're gonna change it and you're gonna make it.

0:07:25.3 DL: I never forget, my son was in high school in an honors English class, and he worked at the beginning of the school year to write this really difficult 15, 20 page paper that they were required to do and everything else. Well, he didn't get it back 'til the following February, after he'd written it in September. And to the teacher's credit, she had 130, 15, 20 page papers to get through, but by the time he got his paper back, I remember him bringing it home and he said, "Yeah, I don't even know what we were doing or why we even wrote this thing." So the feedback really wasn't useful because it wasn't immediate and it wasn't intense, and getting into that point. So, I wanna get back to "by what method are you gonna track this performance" because as you work through, and that's where the idea about the ones emerged, and it emerged with students where they said, "Oh, that's an easy one," they had lots of good metaphors like, "Did you get that one?" And, "Oh, that's an easy one." And "What happens if you didn't get that one?" Well, you can go to somebody who did get their one. Maybe somebody turned theirs in early, and they got a one that met or exceeded the standard... This would be an awesome person for you to go to and get feedback from them.

0:08:52.0 DL: So all of a sudden I was doubling and tripling and quadrupling the number of teachers in the classrooms, because all of these students could help other students if they want to. You don't have to, but if you want to share, share your information. Now why can't can you share your information about how you mastered something or achieved at a high level? Because it's not working to your detriment. See? And the fact that I got my one, and then you work to get your one, is not hurting me at all. I am still, I still aced this, I still got it all correct, whereas...

0:09:34.2 AS: So you're taking a competition that people are, and the ranking and the striving, and the idea that there's only gonna be five As in this class type of thing, and trying to make it more cooperative. Let me ask you a question about the zeroes and one. For the typical teacher or professor out there, are they able to use zeroes and one? Or are they forced to do A, B, C, D, F?

0:10:02.7 DL: Well, some of that goes into what kind of learning management systems do they have in place and does that fit? Does a round peg fit in a square hole? And how could you do that? And lots of methods to make it happen, if you wanna do that.

0:10:21.8 AS: You get a lot of objections, I'm sure, from people saying, "No, you have to have that competition or else people are just gonna, the students are just gonna be lazy and they're not gonna be excited, and you gotta motivate them through this competition and internal competition in the classroom" and all that, whereas when you...

0:10:38.1 DL: Creating that artificial competition just causes more students to quit, give up, do poor quality work because they already know they can't compete with these top level kids that are in the class, so why would I even try?

0:10:53.2 AS: I'm just thinking, I'm just writing down the idea of we want to inspire them to learn, not pound them or rank them into learning.

0:11:05.0 DL: Or do things to try to motivate them to get it to that level. All true motivation is internal, and unless you're creating systems that enable the individuals to tap into that, you're not gonna motivate people. And students are gonna get away... You could punish them. You could do all kinds of things. I read an article just recently, teacher was pontificating, "Should I finally get rid of depriving students of recess to get them to do work?"

0:11:42.8 DL: I think Dagwood in the cartoons one time said, "That's a great idea 'til you think about it." That, here you have, especially at an elementary level, kids that desperately need to get out and run around and get the cerebral fluids going up and down their spinal column, and come back with a renewed sense of energy. Right? And to attack stuff.

0:12:10.1 AS: It's exactly what they need.

0:12:13.2 DL: Right. Exactly what we need, but no, I'm gonna deprive you of that and force you to stay in during recess and now you're gonna be tired and upset, etcetera. And now I got that to deal with on the other side. You just compound your problems over and over, and probably 94% of the reason that they didn't get the work done is the fault of the teacher and the system to begin with.

0:12:37.4 AS: And coming back to the idea of the teacher that goes, "Oh, David, so what now, I have to inspire my students?"

0:12:46.2 DL: Well, that's what... Books have been written on that, and that's been going on for years and years and years. But the thing is, students are already inspired. So, the only thing you can do by trying inspirational methods is de-motivate them to give up. Right? And even... I remember having students come into my class on the first day of school, and just three or four of them just put their heads in their desk and not even look up, and it was hard for me to start to believe, "Oh yeah, these guys are inspired." But if you go back in their history, and these were high school kids, well, for the last 10 years, what, they've been beaten down by grading systems and told they can't do stuff and punished into compliance and rewarded and punished and over and over and over... "It's just a whole lot better just to put my head down and pretend to go to sleep and endure this rather than actually try to participate." So when you get to that kind of a situation, you have to think about, "Alright, I have to change this situation," and watch how behavior changes, rather than what most educators even today are taught. They basically leave the situation alone and try to punish people into compliance with that.

0:14:10.1 AS: Yeah, so for the listeners out there, think about it. Where in your life are you trying to punish or browbeat compliance, versus inspiring excellence? And I'm thinking myself, David, about my challenge I faced with my mother and trying to figure out how to keep her healthy at 84. And, yeah, recently it's been a bit of browbeating, and you've made me think. And I think that this discussion helps all the listeners think about that. I want to just go back to the topic and I wanna try to summarize and see if you can bring what you want the takeaways to be. The topic of today's discussion is, "By What Method?" What are the key takeaways that you want the audience to get as we wrap up?

0:14:56.5 DL: Well, if I think about Deming talking about the evils of grading systems, so if I'm not gonna do that by what method am I gonna do? As a teacher I do have to track progress and I do have to know that people are achieving, etcetera. So by what method am I gonna do that? And what I'm describing is not necessarily the only method, it's the method that I came up with the help of my students over many, many years. And that enabled for almost every student to get an A. And as a high school teacher I saw about 135 kids a day in about six different class periods. And before I met Deming, when I looked back at the grades that I had, the highest number of As I ever got was about 10-15% of students in that process. And when I went to this method I was getting, out of 135 kids, one year I got 133 kids that all had As. And I didn't, it wasn't like we got smarter kids. [chuckle] I got a new method by which students could get there. And change the method, you get a different behavior, and you get a different result.

0:16:14.6 AS: Great. So David, thanks for your contributions and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

David and Andrew's discussion of how using Deming in the classroom not only inspires achievement it also creates collaboration among excited students.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford where we explore Deming's thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is "By what method?" David, take it away.

0:00:28.9 David Langford: Great. So in previous broadcasts, we've talked a lot about deadlines and processes, and operational definitions and quality standards and all kinds of things like that. So today I wanted to talk about, "By what method?" Dr. Deming tattooed that on my forehead, because so many times people would propose things to him and he would say, "By what method?" in his Deming voice. It's all about the method of what it is you're going to do. So what I learned to do is, instead of trying to calculate, "Is this a 92 or an 88 or 88.1?" and then I got the student upset with me, and then because I gave them an 89, I messed up their GPA, and now, so now they're not gonna get a scholarship, and now Mom and Dad is mad at me and it just goes on and on and on. And so, instead of trying to improve that process, I started working on a method to completely get out of it, and especially today, especially in K-12, lots of schools are trying to go to what they call standards-based grading, where they want all students to achieve, but unless... If you start applying a new theory like that, but you keep it in the old system for the last several hundred years, you're gonna have problems.

0:02:08.0 DL: So I had to figure out how can I do that? What can I do? Well, over time it slowly evolved into a process where if somebody turned in an assignment and it met or exceeded the standard for the assignment, then I started to say, "Well, you got that one", to kids and students. Well, that finally, I started to realize, well, why can't that just be my grade book? Either you got a one, which signifies that on this assignment, you did it to standard and you did everything required and you got a one, or it's just blank. If it's just blank, it means you still have to keep working on it to get a one.

0:02:57.9 AS: Just to clarify that. When you say met or exceeded, that's one statement, that's not saying met is one thing and exceeded is another. Is that correct?

0:03:06.3 DL: That's right.

0:03:07.2 AS: Okay.

0:03:07.3 DL: Because yes, we have a quality standard with this assignment, but I may be really interested in this, and so I did a whole bunch more than was required. Right? And so, I still wanna recognize that with students, "Look at, look at this, look what this. You did this and you went above and beyond the standard." Right?

0:03:27.8 AS: Right.

0:03:28.3 DL: So you still get a one for doing that, and I'm not gonna take away your desire to go above the standard by giving you A+++ or all kinds of games that teachers play. You got that one, which is awesome, and the rest is just joy and learning for you. Or if you went above the standard, okay, I might give you a chance to share what you did with the rest of class.

0:03:58.6 AS: That's what I was just thinking about. Yeah.

0:04:01.8 DL: Yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna ask you, I'm gonna ask you, "Would you be willing to share this?" I'd say, 99% of the time, kids said, "Yeah, yeah, I'd be glad to share this." And I would say the same thing to them. "Okay, but when you share what you did and the level you took this to, I want you to describe by what method did you do that."

0:04:23.2 DL: And it was so fascinating because students would say, "You know, this is what I did, and this is my project, and this how it turned out, and I'm really proud of it and everything... " Okay, by what method did you do that? "Well, I set aside 10 minutes every day just to work on this project." And amazingly, you'd see other students in the class go, "Oh, that's how they did that. They weren't just smart." Right? Because the traditional system pegs people like that. You got smart kids and the not so smart kids, right? And kids start to learn, "Well, she's just a lot smarter. So that's why she could do that." No, she had a method. Right? She may be smart too, she may have a preponderance of neurons in that part of her brain that just helps her be really good in that area. I also bet that person had a method that got him to that level, and if I give them a chance to share that method, other people can learn from that.

0:05:29.5 AS: Can I go back? Just take a step back and talk about when Dr. Deming said, "By what method?" Let's just talk briefly about what he meant by that, because sometimes, you know, we have scrutiny, let's say in management, in companies, by saying, "I don't want you to hit your goal by doing something unethical. You've gotta live up to our values. So if that's your method, don't do it. But any other method, I don't care." Right? So we oftentimes think "by what method" only applied maybe to the ethical behavior of an employee, but why is Deming saying, "By what method?"

0:06:05.6 DL: Well, you have the same thing in education. Why do we have cheating in education? And then, teachers start spending all their time trying to catch the cheaters, right? So they come up with all tricks and even when taking SAT tests and national tests, right, "We have to space them four feet apart and we have to do this, and we have to have it timed, and you have to have to work this, because we have to catch the cheaters, and that's our job because we think are our job's inspectors", right? Well, when you start to take all of that out and saying, "Well, no, that's not my job. My job is to set up the environment and the system in such a way that you can achieve, and if you don't get it to the level I want you to get to, what's gonna happen, well you're gonna get help". Novel idea. And in some cases, you're gonna get a lot of help and it's gonna be pretty intense feedback that it turns out, in neuroscience, that in order for you to switch on basic, your learning genes, you need intense and immediate feedback on stuff. So the quicker I can get you feedback on stuff, the more likely are, you're gonna change it and you're gonna make it.

0:07:25.3 DL: I never forget, my son was in high school in an honors English class, and he worked at the beginning of the school year to write this really difficult 15, 20 page paper that they were required to do and everything else. Well, he didn't get it back 'til the following February, after he'd written it in September. And to the teacher's credit, she had 130, 15, 20 page papers to get through, but by the time he got his paper back, I remember him bringing it home and he said, "Yeah, I don't even know what we were doing or why we even wrote this thing." So the feedback really wasn't useful because it wasn't immediate and it wasn't intense, and getting into that point. So, I wanna get back to "by what method are you gonna track this performance" because as you work through, and that's where the idea about the ones emerged, and it emerged with students where they said, "Oh, that's an easy one," they had lots of good metaphors like, "Did you get that one?" And, "Oh, that's an easy one." And "What happens if you didn't get that one?" Well, you can go to somebody who did get their one. Maybe somebody turned theirs in early, and they got a one that met or exceeded the standard... This would be an awesome person for you to go to and get feedback from them.

0:08:52.0 DL: So all of a sudden I was doubling and tripling and quadrupling the number of teachers in the classrooms, because all of these students could help other students if they want to. You don't have to, but if you want to share, share your information. Now why can't can you share your information about how you mastered something or achieved at a high level? Because it's not working to your detriment. See? And the fact that I got my one, and then you work to get your one, is not hurting me at all. I am still, I still aced this, I still got it all correct, whereas...

0:09:34.2 AS: So you're taking a competition that people are, and the ranking and the striving, and the idea that there's only gonna be five As in this class type of thing, and trying to make it more cooperative. Let me ask you a question about the zeroes and one. For the typical teacher or professor out there, are they able to use zeroes and one? Or are they forced to do A, B, C, D, F?

0:10:02.7 DL: Well, some of that goes into what kind of learning management systems do they have in place and does that fit? Does a round peg fit in a square hole? And how could you do that? And lots of methods to make it happen, if you wanna do that.

0:10:21.8 AS: You get a lot of objections, I'm sure, from people saying, "No, you have to have that competition or else people are just gonna, the students are just gonna be lazy and they're not gonna be excited, and you gotta motivate them through this competition and internal competition in the classroom" and all that, whereas when you...

0:10:38.1 DL: Creating that artificial competition just causes more students to quit, give up, do poor quality work because they already know they can't compete with these top level kids that are in the class, so why would I even try?

0:10:53.2 AS: I'm just thinking, I'm just writing down the idea of we want to inspire them to learn, not pound them or rank them into learning.

0:11:05.0 DL: Or do things to try to motivate them to get it to that level. All true motivation is internal, and unless you're creating systems that enable the individuals to tap into that, you're not gonna motivate people. And students are gonna get away... You could punish them. You could do all kinds of things. I read an article just recently, teacher was pontificating, "Should I finally get rid of depriving students of recess to get them to do work?"

0:11:42.8 DL: I think Dagwood in the cartoons one time said, "That's a great idea 'til you think about it." That, here you have, especially at an elementary level, kids that desperately need to get out and run around and get the cerebral fluids going up and down their spinal column, and come back with a renewed sense of energy. Right? And to attack stuff.

0:12:10.1 AS: It's exactly what they need.

0:12:13.2 DL: Right. Exactly what we need, but no, I'm gonna deprive you of that and force you to stay in during recess and now you're gonna be tired and upset, etcetera. And now I got that to deal with on the other side. You just compound your problems over and over, and probably 94% of the reason that they didn't get the work done is the fault of the teacher and the system to begin with.

0:12:37.4 AS: And coming back to the idea of the teacher that goes, "Oh, David, so what now, I have to inspire my students?"

0:12:46.2 DL: Well, that's what... Books have been written on that, and that's been going on for years and years and years. But the thing is, students are already inspired. So, the only thing you can do by trying inspirational methods is de-motivate them to give up. Right? And even... I remember having students come into my class on the first day of school, and just three or four of them just put their heads in their desk and not even look up, and it was hard for me to start to believe, "Oh yeah, these guys are inspired." But if you go back in their history, and these were high school kids, well, for the last 10 years, what, they've been beaten down by grading systems and told they can't do stuff and punished into compliance and rewarded and punished and over and over and over... "It's just a whole lot better just to put my head down and pretend to go to sleep and endure this rather than actually try to participate." So when you get to that kind of a situation, you have to think about, "Alright, I have to change this situation," and watch how behavior changes, rather than what most educators even today are taught. They basically leave the situation alone and try to punish people into compliance with that.

0:14:10.1 AS: Yeah, so for the listeners out there, think about it. Where in your life are you trying to punish or browbeat compliance, versus inspiring excellence? And I'm thinking myself, David, about my challenge I faced with my mother and trying to figure out how to keep her healthy at 84. And, yeah, recently it's been a bit of browbeating, and you've made me think. And I think that this discussion helps all the listeners think about that. I want to just go back to the topic and I wanna try to summarize and see if you can bring what you want the takeaways to be. The topic of today's discussion is, "By What Method?" What are the key takeaways that you want the audience to get as we wrap up?

0:14:56.5 DL: Well, if I think about Deming talking about the evils of grading systems, so if I'm not gonna do that by what method am I gonna do? As a teacher I do have to track progress and I do have to know that people are achieving, etcetera. So by what method am I gonna do that? And what I'm describing is not necessarily the only method, it's the method that I came up with the help of my students over many, many years. And that enabled for almost every student to get an A. And as a high school teacher I saw about 135 kids a day in about six different class periods. And before I met Deming, when I looked back at the grades that I had, the highest number of As I ever got was about 10-15% of students in that process. And when I went to this method I was getting, out of 135 kids, one year I got 133 kids that all had As. And I didn't, it wasn't like we got smarter kids. [chuckle] I got a new method by which students could get there. And change the method, you get a different behavior, and you get a different result.

0:16:14.6 AS: Great. So David, thanks for your contributions and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

In this episode, David and Andrew continue to talk about the thorny problem of tracking student progress - grading - and how to remove it from the classroom.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford, where we explore Deming thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is a continuation of the discussion on tracking progress in learning. David, take it away.

0:00:34.4 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew, it's great to be back again. In the previous podcast, we were discussing tracking learning and the typical way to track learning is grading people; A, B, C, D, and F, and Deming was very adamant that we could significantly improve the education system if we just stopped grading people. So, in my work with education over the last 30 years, a lot of educators get that, and they don't like grading and they've never liked having to do it and being the final judge. And then there's another whole group that thinks it's their right to judge people and give them a grade about what they could do. So, I mentioned in one of the earlier broadcasts that Deming said, "Why would I wanna judge somebody today when I don't know who's gonna turn out to be great in the future?" So I wouldn't wanna do anything that's gonna limit them.

0:01:33.2 DL: So as a teacher myself, having to think through that and having to actually work inside of a grading system and try to figure out what you could do, I think you first have to go through the thought process; is it possible for everyone in a class, for instance, to achieve. And if you say to yourself, "No, it's not possible." I had some students that said, "It's just not possible," they can't do it, you're probably never gonna get there. But if you start to say, "if it was possible, what would we have to change in the system in order to optimize everybody getting to that point?" Well, it always turns out that through neural science, every educator, even parents, will tell you that everybody learns at a different rate. You give somebody a complex problem or something somebody might be able to answer that in three seconds, and other people it might take them a very long time, but they could eventually get it, it just might take a lot longer for you to get there. And so, we sort of truncate that in education, and we talked about, last time, about deadlines and what deadlines mean, and those are mostly for the person managing the class to keep the class moving, right?

0:02:57.1 DL: Because if I just sort of make it open-ended and say, "Okay, well, everybody has to get to a certain level of performance, and we'll just keep it open until you get there," most teachers will tell you it would just be chaos, so the idea of changing a deadline to a target date, so... Yes, here's what you need to know and learn, or the process of what you need to go through. And our target date for you to finish this is this Friday, so then we run into the problem, well, what happens if somebody doesn't do it, or they don't do it at all, right? Well, in the current systems, if somebody doesn't do it at all, some teachers actually like that, 'cause then you don't have to grade people, you just give them a zero, right? And you go on. But if you think about, "no, my job is to optimize that child's performance." So if you didn't get it done, then we're gonna have a conversation. "How quickly can you get it done? When can I expect to see this?" That you're not getting off the hook, so to speak. I observed this with high school classes I was teaching when I first met Deming, and students would just tell me, "just give me a C," or "just give me a C or a D or something", and sometimes they would be basketball players or something like that, and they'd say, "Well, I just need a D so I can play basketball."

0:04:29.6 DL: "So that's all I really want. What do I have to do to get a D?" [chuckle] So all this thinking theory comes into play when you think about, "Okay, well, how do I have to change the system?" So if I change the system to one in which I say, "Well, there is no such thing as sub-level of poor performance." [chuckle] That make sense?

0:04:54.2 AS: [chuckle] No. What does that mean?

0:04:57.2 DL: I want everybody to do A-level type work, so if I'm gonna try to get everybody as close as I can to that, then we're gonna have to define that, and Deming would call that an operational definition. So it has to be very clear to everyone; what do you have to do to get to this level of performance? And then if people understand clearly what that operational definition is, I called it a quality standard; here's the quality standard for this, and I learned over a period of time to always ask students, "If you were to do this really well, what would it be like? Or what would it look like?" And boy, they're really strict on it, and they were often more strict than I. But first getting their input also, I got their buy-in on it, they said, "Well, it should be this and it should be... The writing should be clear." "Well, what does that mean? Writing should be clear?" So we're gonna have to operationally define that and that process could take a while. But Deming talked a lot about that prevention is the key to quality, so I'm probably gonna spend more time up front when we have an assignment, or task to be done, or a project, or whatever you wanna call it, and defining the standard for quality, because as we go through the process, I basically want people to self-evaluate themselves, right? And whenever they...

0:06:35.6 DL: Yes, we have a target date that we're gonna need to get this in by Friday to stay on our overall plan for the whole quarter semester, whatever it might be, so I'm gonna have to share that with them also. Right? 'Cause there's ramifications if we don't get this done by Friday, that's gonna cause us to fall behind as a whole class. If we keep on that track, we're gonna get further and further behind. So this thinking all comes into play because you also have to understand special and common cause variation that Deming talked about, and in other broadcasts we'll get much deeper into what that means statistically in education. But briefly, so here I have my target date on Friday, and then the projects come in, then I have to take a look as a teacher, do I have common cause variation with that, meaning that probably 90... Deming talked about 90%, 94% of the students all attempted to do something. And then I have special cause variation, so I have some kids that didn't do it at all, or they did it so poorly that they're gonna need special help.

0:07:50.2 DL: That's what Deming talked about. They don't need more rating and ranking, it's not gonna do any good. They need special help, which means I'm gonna have to spend time with them one-on-one and go through, well, What didn't you understand? And what can we do and how can I help you? And so and so forth. That's gonna take my time. Then I have the common cause variation, which is that 94% of students who didn't make an attempt. I wanna take a look at all of that work and start to say, Okay, are there common cause problems within that? So probably most of the reasons that you're getting common cause variation or problems from a whole classroom of students has to do with your process as a teacher. [chuckle]

0:08:35.7 AS: Interesting, it makes me think about delivery of products in a company.

0:08:42.8 DL: Yeah, it's the same principle. Same principle.

0:08:42.9 AS: Yeah, you've got an objective that you wanna deliver this exactly two hours after you've packaged it in the warehouse or whatever, you want it to arrive, but there's a lot of different factors. But let's say you set a target time based upon the location that you're delivering to, and in the queue of where that is, but you've set an approximate time and your objective is to try to hit as closely to that time. Now, many people may say, Oh no, actually your objective is to hit earlier. But not really, I think to make it a really robust system, you need to be really accurate. And so when I think about it with education, I would say that from a... You want everybody to submit at a certain time, but you're gonna have a small number of people that are just super stars, they're gonna submit early, and majority of people that there's gonna be this long tail of submitting late.

0:09:32.2 DL: So you can have special cause variation on the high achieving end in education, and you can have special cause variation on the lower end, not cheating. And both of those you wanna handle it as special causes. You remind me of... I had a college professor one time that very clearly told us all, "Do not hand anything in before it's due, even if you're finished." And I went up to talk to him afterwards. I said, "Why do you tell people to do that?" And he said, "Well, you just give me more time to grade your work."

0:10:08.7 AS: [laughter]

0:10:09.4 DL: "And I will find something wrong with it." So it's like inspectors in a house, if your job is to be an inspector, that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna find something wrong. Otherwise, why do we have you.

0:10:22.7 AS: Yeah. "I didn't find anything there. I didn't find anything there." What are you doing?

0:10:26.2 DL: Yeah. Why do we need you then? Right. So, I want to get back to this process of, Yes, you have a target date, etcetera. So if I have common cause variation and a large percentage of the students are not meeting the target date and hitting the target standard for that, that's probably a systems problem, a common cause problem. And when you go back and you ask students why, Why is your work not meeting the standard? It could be internal forces, outside forces, there could be all kinds of things like that, that... Maybe the common thing is, Well, I didn't have enough time. Alright, then, where's your time going? What are you doing with your time? We can track that. We can figure that out, etcetera. And you may be right, the task that I'm giving this group actually requires much more time, so in my process upfront, if I'm going to the students and saying, Okay, here's the quality standard for this assignment, how much time do you think you're gonna need to get your work to this standard and turn that in? And so I created a tool for doing that, called the Loss function to figure out, and I got that from the Taguchi loss function and Deming.

0:11:55.0 DL: And I'd just ask students, How many days is it gonna take you to get it to this level? And that was also fascinating too, because many, many times they would take a look at everything that needs to be done, look at all of the other things that they need to do, and they would set a timeline shorter than what I would have done. So I'm actually improving the quality of all the work and shortening the timeline at the same time, which is gonna enable me to move kids to a higher and higher level than ever thought possible before in the same process, simply by asking them. And some things, yes, it might be shorter and some things it might be a bit longer. But I'd rather err on the side of a bit longer and have more students get to an A-level or a quality standard for this than do the opposite process, just arbitrarily set a due date and then grade all of the people performances that comes in. So if we get to the target date, and I look at a child's work. I'm looking at it, I'm not grading it, I'm looking at it to see, does it meet or exceed the standard for this assignment? If it meets or exceeds. Great, [chuckle] right.

0:13:16.2 AS: Yep.

0:13:16.7 DL: And then we can talk about you know how do we put that in a marking book or whatever it might be. What if it doesn't meet or exceed I asked Deming this question, because he taught at New York University, I said, What do you do when you get papers in, and clearly it's not to the standard that you think it should be. He said, Well, I have a conversation with them. I teach, a very, very strange practice, right?

0:13:42.6 AS: Yeah.

0:13:43.7 DL: I'd go back to them, I start to say, Well, I need more explanation about this, or I don't think this is quite right, and I think if you corrected this, you might be right or this, and then they get time to correct that and make it right. It turns out psychologically, which is part of Deming's profound knowledge right... Psychologically, this has huge impact, the power that if I didn't quite get there in the time that I was supposed to get there, I can go back and fix it. I can do it, yeah because...

0:14:14.6 AS: Welcome to the real world.

0:14:16.6 DL: Yes, because my job is to make sure you learn this. Right. Not to play some grading game or... Time game, right? My job is, you see that you learn this material and basically remember it for the rest of your life.

0:14:30.9 AS: Yep. So in the last couple of minutes, let's try to wrap up what we've learned, what we've discussed, I just think about some of the things that I wrote down while you were talking... Right? You made me think like, Okay, the goal of the system of education is to help each kid optimize their learning rather than just a classroom or a teacher optimizing their job. The second thing is, we talked about that you can let go of deadlines, and once you do that, you need to set better maybe operating, operational definitions or what you call quality standards, to more clearly design what it is or define what it is, is a good outcome this is the book, it's called Tom Sawyer. And these are the things that I want you to get out of it, or you internally, or as you said, you can go to the students and talk about what you want out of it, and then special help. The other thing you said is there's special help or special causes where we have someone, for instance, that's struggling, needs special focus, not rating and degrading them with that. What else would you add to the summary of the learnings from that.

0:15:58.0 DL: When you hold everyone to a high standard, you're actually improving performance for the whole system and for the whole standard for everybody and then what people quickly learn is that... Well, if I turn something in on the due date, just because I wanna turn it in on that date, what's gonna happen to me? One, I'm just gonna get a whole bunch of feedback and I'm gonna have to fix it, and now I have twice as much work to do, because now we're going on to the next thing that I need to be working on, and I have to get this fixed up. So what you're teaching people is try to do it right the first time, build quality into your processes, and that was partly my job as a teacher too, is to teach them how to do that, so they get closer and closer and closer to that target date and so they always feel gratified. And in doing that, basically, you can get to a point where almost everyone in your class is getting an A or what we would call A-quality work, right? And when that happens, you have joy in learning, and you have it on a massive scale because everybody's very happy and so...

0:17:13.6 AS: That's great, I love that. And the other thing I was just thinking about is you said something really kind of mind-blowing right at the end, and that was the idea of once you start working with someone and you start... You know you forget about the deadline, like what if we let go of the deadline I can imagine parents thinking that, but what you just said is, you open up a whole new world to this kid who may have been just always struggling with this deadline, and instead you're saying, I want your contribution, no matter what the deadline says, and that... Then as you said, opens up a whole new world for that student to think, Wow, okay, this is different, now I really wanna contribute and so.

0:17:58.1 DL: Well, it's that you... Some people think that maybe this is semantics, etcetera, but by not using the word deadline and I change that to a target date... Makes much more sense. This is the target date. Did I hit the target date? Yes, great. I have nothing to worry about and my work meets or exceeds the standard. Awesome, great. You have nothing to worry about, right? I didn't meet the target date, okay, I got some worries, I gotta get this fixed up, or it didn't meet the standard, Oh, I gotta get this fixed up. So anyway, my goal is to get them to have that joy in learning, because if you think about a student that sort of slopped through it and didn't do a good job and is continually getting Cs, Ds and Fs on things, there's not much joy in that right, right?

0:18:52.7 AS: Definitely. Definitely.

0:18:52.8 DL: You want people to feel really proud of the work Deming talked about that too. Pride of workmanship.

0:18:58.1 AS: And ranking doubles down on that unhappiness feeling that they're feeling right then.

0:19:02.7 DL: Absolutely.

0:19:04.9 AS: So, David, thanks for your contribution, and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.

In this episode, David and Andrew continue to talk about the thorny problem of tracking student progress - grading - and how to remove it from the classroom. 

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, we continue our series of Deming in Education with David P. Langford, where we explore Deming thinking to create joy in learning. David Langford has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to help everyone get the most out of learning. Today's topic is a continuation of the discussion on tracking progress in learning. David, take it away.

0:00:34.4 David Langford: Thank you, Andrew, it's great to be back again. In the previous podcast, we were discussing tracking learning and the typical way to track learning is grading people; A, B, C, D, and F, and Deming was very adamant that we could significantly improve the education system if we just stopped grading people. So, in my work with education over the last 30 years, a lot of educators get that, and they don't like grading and they've never liked having to do it and being the final judge. And then there's another whole group that thinks it's their right to judge people and give them a grade about what they could do. So, I mentioned in one of the earlier broadcasts that Deming said, "Why would I wanna judge somebody today when I don't know who's gonna turn out to be great in the future?" So I wouldn't wanna do anything that's gonna limit them.

0:01:33.2 DL: So as a teacher myself, having to think through that and having to actually work inside of a grading system and try to figure out what you could do, I think you first have to go through the thought process; is it possible for everyone in a class, for instance, to achieve. And if you say to yourself, "No, it's not possible." I had some students that said, "It's just not possible," they can't do it, you're probably never gonna get there. But if you start to say, "if it was possible, what would we have to change in the system in order to optimize everybody getting to that point?" Well, it always turns out that through neural science, every educator, even parents, will tell you that everybody learns at a different rate. You give somebody a complex problem or something somebody might be able to answer that in three seconds, and other people it might take them a very long time, but they could eventually get it, it just might take a lot longer for you to get there. And so, we sort of truncate that in education, and we talked about, last time, about deadlines and what deadlines mean, and those are mostly for the person managing the class to keep the class moving, right?

0:02:57.1 DL: Because if I just sort of make it open-ended and say, "Okay, well, everybody has to get to a certain level of performance, and we'll just keep it open until you get there," most teachers will tell you it would just be chaos, so the idea of changing a deadline to a target date, so... Yes, here's what you need to know and learn, or the process of what you need to go through. And our target date for you to finish this is this Friday, so then we run into the problem, well, what happens if somebody doesn't do it, or they don't do it at all, right? Well, in the current systems, if somebody doesn't do it at all, some teachers actually like that, 'cause then you don't have to grade people, you just give them a zero, right? And you go on. But if you think about, "no, my job is to optimize that child's performance." So if you didn't get it done, then we're gonna have a conversation. "How quickly can you get it done? When can I expect to see this?" That you're not getting off the hook, so to speak. I observed this with high school classes I was teaching when I first met Deming, and students would just tell me, "just give me a C," or "just give me a C or a D or something", and sometimes they would be basketball players or something like that, and they'd say, "Well, I just need a D so I can play basketball."

0:04:29.6 DL: "So that's all I really want. What do I have to do to get a D?" [chuckle] So all this thinking theory comes into play when you think about, "Okay, well, how do I have to change the system?" So if I change the system to one in which I say, "Well, there is no such thing as sub-level of poor performance." [chuckle] That make sense?

0:04:54.2 AS: [chuckle] No. What does that mean?

0:04:57.2 DL: I want everybody to do A-level type work, so if I'm gonna try to get everybody as close as I can to that, then we're gonna have to define that, and Deming would call that an operational definition. So it has to be very clear to everyone; what do you have to do to get to this level of performance? And then if people understand clearly what that operational definition is, I called it a quality standard; here's the quality standard for this, and I learned over a period of time to always ask students, "If you were to do this really well, what would it be like? Or what would it look like?" And boy, they're really strict on it, and they were often more strict than I. But first getting their input also, I got their buy-in on it, they said, "Well, it should be this and it should be... The writing should be clear." "Well, what does that mean? Writing should be clear?" So we're gonna have to operationally define that and that process could take a while. But Deming talked a lot about that prevention is the key to quality, so I'm probably gonna spend more time up front when we have an assignment, or task to be done, or a project, or whatever you wanna call it, and defining the standard for quality, because as we go through the process, I basically want people to self-evaluate themselves, right? And whenever they...

0:06:35.6 DL: Yes, we have a target date that we're gonna need to get this in by Friday to stay on our overall plan for the whole quarter semester, whatever it might be, so I'm gonna have to share that with them also. Right? 'Cause there's ramifications if we don't get this done by Friday, that's gonna cause us to fall behind as a whole class. If we keep on that track, we're gonna get further and further behind. So this thinking all comes into play because you also have to understand special and common cause variation that Deming talked about, and in other broadcasts we'll get much deeper into what that means statistically in education. But briefly, so here I have my target date on Friday, and then the projects come in, then I have to take a look as a teacher, do I have common cause variation with that, meaning that probably 90... Deming talked about 90%, 94% of the students all attempted to do something. And then I have special cause variation, so I have some kids that didn't do it at all, or they did it so poorly that they're gonna need special help.

0:07:50.2 DL: That's what Deming talked about. They don't need more rating and ranking, it's not gonna do any good. They need special help, which means I'm gonna have to spend time with them one-on-one and go through, well, What didn't you understand? And what can we do and how can I help you? And so and so forth. That's gonna take my time. Then I have the common cause variation, which is that 94% of students who didn't make an attempt. I wanna take a look at all of that work and start to say, Okay, are there common cause problems within that? So probably most of the reasons that you're getting common cause variation or problems from a whole classroom of students has to do with your process as a teacher. [chuckle]

0:08:35.7 AS: Interesting, it makes me think about delivery of products in a company.

0:08:42.8 DL: Yeah, it's the same principle. Same principle.

0:08:42.9 AS: Yeah, you've got an objective that you wanna deliver this exactly two hours after you've packaged it in the warehouse or whatever, you want it to arrive, but there's a lot of different factors. But let's say you set a target time based upon the location that you're delivering to, and in the queue of where that is, but you've set an approximate time and your objective is to try to hit as closely to that time. Now, many people may say, Oh no, actually your objective is to hit earlier. But not really, I think to make it a really robust system, you need to be really accurate. And so when I think about it with education, I would say that from a... You want everybody to submit at a certain time, but you're gonna have a small number of people that are just super stars, they're gonna submit early, and majority of people that there's gonna be this long tail of submitting late.

0:09:32.2 DL: So you can have special cause variation on the high achieving end in education, and you can have special cause variation on the lower end, not cheating. And both of those you wanna handle it as special causes. You remind me of... I had a college professor one time that very clearly told us all, "Do not hand anything in before it's due, even if you're finished." And I went up to talk to him afterwards. I said, "Why do you tell people to do that?" And he said, "Well, you just give me more time to grade your work."

0:10:08.7 AS: [laughter]

0:10:09.4 DL: "And I will find something wrong with it." So it's like inspectors in a house, if your job is to be an inspector, that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna find something wrong. Otherwise, why do we have you.

0:10:22.7 AS: Yeah. "I didn't find anything there. I didn't find anything there." What are you doing?

0:10:26.2 DL: Yeah. Why do we need you then? Right. So, I want to get back to this process of, Yes, you have a target date, etcetera. So if I have common cause variation and a large percentage of the students are not meeting the target date and hitting the target standard for that, that's probably a systems problem, a common cause problem. And when you go back and you ask students why, Why is your work not meeting the standard? It could be internal forces, outside forces, there could be all kinds of things like that, that... Maybe the common thing is, Well, I didn't have enough time. Alright, then, where's your time going? What are you doing with your time? We can track that. We can figure that out, etcetera. And you may be right, the task that I'm giving this group actually requires much more time, so in my process upfront, if I'm going to the students and saying, Okay, here's the quality standard for this assignment, how much time do you think you're gonna need to get your work to this standard and turn that in? And so I created a tool for doing that, called the Loss function to figure out, and I got that from the Taguchi loss function and Deming.

0:11:55.0 DL: And I'd just ask students, How many days is it gonna take you to get it to this level? And that was also fascinating too, because many, many times they would take a look at everything that needs to be done, look at all of the other things that they need to do, and they would set a timeline shorter than what I would have done. So I'm actually improving the quality of all the work and shortening the timeline at the same time, which is gonna enable me to move kids to a higher and higher level than ever thought possible before in the same process, simply by asking them. And some things, yes, it might be shorter and some things it might be a bit longer. But I'd rather err on the side of a bit longer and have more students get to an A-level or a quality standard for this than do the opposite process, just arbitrarily set a due date and then grade all of the people performances that comes in. So if we get to the target date, and I look at a child's work. I'm looking at it, I'm not grading it, I'm looking at it to see, does it meet or exceed the standard for this assignment? If it meets or exceeds. Great, [chuckle] right.

0:13:16.2 AS: Yep.

0:13:16.7 DL: And then we can talk about you know how do we put that in a marking book or whatever it might be. What if it doesn't meet or exceed I asked Deming this question, because he taught at New York University, I said, What do you do when you get papers in, and clearly it's not to the standard that you think it should be. He said, Well, I have a conversation with them. I teach, a very, very strange practice, right?

0:13:42.6 AS: Yeah.

0:13:43.7 DL: I'd go back to them, I start to say, Well, I need more explanation about this, or I don't think this is quite right, and I think if you corrected this, you might be right or this, and then they get time to correct that and make it right. It turns out psychologically, which is part of Deming's profound knowledge right... Psychologically, this has huge impact, the power that if I didn't quite get there in the time that I was supposed to get there, I can go back and fix it. I can do it, yeah because...

0:14:14.6 AS: Welcome to the real world.

0:14:16.6 DL: Yes, because my job is to make sure you learn this. Right. Not to play some grading game or... Time game, right? My job is, you see that you learn this material and basically remember it for the rest of your life.

0:14:30.9 AS: Yep. So in the last couple of minutes, let's try to wrap up what we've learned, what we've discussed, I just think about some of the things that I wrote down while you were talking... Right? You made me think like, Okay, the goal of the system of education is to help each kid optimize their learning rather than just a classroom or a teacher optimizing their job. The second thing is, we talked about that you can let go of deadlines, and once you do that, you need to set better maybe operating, operational definitions or what you call quality standards, to more clearly design what it is or define what it is, is a good outcome this is the book, it's called Tom Sawyer. And these are the things that I want you to get out of it, or you internally, or as you said, you can go to the students and talk about what you want out of it, and then special help. The other thing you said is there's special help or special causes where we have someone, for instance, that's struggling, needs special focus, not rating and degrading them with that. What else would you add to the summary of the learnings from that.

0:15:58.0 DL: When you hold everyone to a high standard, you're actually improving performance for the whole system and for the whole standard for everybody and then what people quickly learn is that... Well, if I turn something in on the due date, just because I wanna turn it in on that date, what's gonna happen to me? One, I'm just gonna get a whole bunch of feedback and I'm gonna have to fix it, and now I have twice as much work to do, because now we're going on to the next thing that I need to be working on, and I have to get this fixed up. So what you're teaching people is try to do it right the first time, build quality into your processes, and that was partly my job as a teacher too, is to teach them how to do that, so they get closer and closer and closer to that target date and so they always feel gratified. And in doing that, basically, you can get to a point where almost everyone in your class is getting an A or what we would call A-quality work, right? And when that happens, you have joy in learning, and you have it on a massive scale because everybody's very happy and so...

0:17:13.6 AS: That's great, I love that. And the other thing I was just thinking about is you said something really kind of mind-blowing right at the end, and that was the idea of once you start working with someone and you start... You know you forget about the deadline, like what if we let go of the deadline I can imagine parents thinking that, but what you just said is, you open up a whole new world to this kid who may have been just always struggling with this deadline, and instead you're saying, I want your contribution, no matter what the deadline says, and that... Then as you said, opens up a whole new world for that student to think, Wow, okay, this is different, now I really wanna contribute and so.

0:17:58.1 DL: Well, it's that you... Some people think that maybe this is semantics, etcetera, but by not using the word deadline and I change that to a target date... Makes much more sense. This is the target date. Did I hit the target date? Yes, great. I have nothing to worry about and my work meets or exceeds the standard. Awesome, great. You have nothing to worry about, right? I didn't meet the target date, okay, I got some worries, I gotta get this fixed up, or it didn't meet the standard, Oh, I gotta get this fixed up. So anyway, my goal is to get them to have that joy in learning, because if you think about a student that sort of slopped through it and didn't do a good job and is continually getting Cs, Ds and Fs on things, there's not much joy in that right, right?

0:18:52.7 AS: Definitely. Definitely.

0:18:52.8 DL: You want people to feel really proud of the work Deming talked about that too. Pride of workmanship.

0:18:58.1 AS: And ranking doubles down on that unhappiness feeling that they're feeling right then.

0:19:02.7 DL: Absolutely.

0:19:04.9 AS: So, David, thanks for your contribution, and on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you and our listeners for striving to bring joy in learning.