Continuous improvement: Two lessons from the classroom

The concept of continuous improvement is an important one, not only for organizations, but for individuals, too. I like to think that as I've matured, professionally and chronologically, I've devoted more attention to practicing continuous improvement, both professionally and personally.

Since, I started teaching a couple of years ago, I've found that some aspects of classroom teaching naturally lend themselves to practicing continuous improvement. Yesterday, I was thinking about how I approach continuous improvement in my teaching and the lessons those practices hold for practicing it in other areas.


Lesson 1: Planning is important, but nothing happens until the implementation begins

When I was working in the municipal sector, we would occasionally get caught up in "paralysis by analysis" and our planning became an impediment, rather than a means, to doing anything. We were essentially trying to develop a flawless plan before we began a new project. But that's impossible.

If there is some urgency about a project, then we may be less prone to fall into this trap. But if our project is in quadrant two - important but not urgent - we often seem more prone. That's unfortunate because time spent in excessive planning is time that we aren't getting the benefit of whatever it is that we are trying to do.

In the classroom, I don't have the dubious luxury of endless planning. A new semester starts on a date certain and I have to start teaching then - ready or not. If I'm teaching a course for the first time or revising a course I've taught previously, then I have to be ready. I can't keep tweaking my syllabus and assignments endlessly. This set starting date is to my benefit.

For many of us, however, our working life isn't neatly divided into 15-week chunks of activity. We don't necessarily have set launch dates for new initiatives imposed on us by others. Perhaps it would be helpful to set them ourselves.

Maybe one of the early planning decisions should be "When are we gonna kick this thing off?" Setting that date and making a commitment to meet it will help to create a sense of urgency that will help us to plan and then do.

Lesson 2: There can be no improvement without routine evaluation

This idea is so obvious that it seems sort of stupid to point it out as a lesson. But it is a lesson that we sometimes neglect when we are caught up in our day-to-day implementation.

In teaching, there are points at which it seems natural to stop and evaluate my performance. Just as the semester begins on a date certain, it ends the same way. At the end of each semester, I take some time to note what worked and didn't work in the classroom and identify things I should do differently in the future. Several weeks later, I receive the results of my students' evaluations of my teaching performance, providing another opportunity for review. The student evaluations not only provide numerical rankings of things such as my organization of the material, but some of them also provide written comments that provide more specific feedback.

Again, however, those of us who don't have our work lives divided into neat chunks may not always have these naturally occurring points for review and evaluation. We are often engaged in ongoing operations with no real beginning and end; we don't have "semesters" when we stop and start over. That's why we need to schedule these reviews - weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever schedule will provide us with the timely feedback we need to improve.

So, the cycle of academic life lends itself to practicing continuous improvement in teaching. Other activities lack this structure and we need to create it. For example, as a faculty member my research and service activities don't have the same cycle as my teaching activities. So I need to create a cycle by setting times for regular self reviews of my performance. That will lead to continuous improvement and that's what I try to be all about.