This specific methodology sounds similar to many other types of fad programs found in Progressive (public) schools. I can see this harmonizing nicely with “student-centred learning” as w’ll as “21st Century learning” initiatives.  Direct instruction in general is better, and Direct Instruction a la Siegfried Engelmann is tops.  Not too many people know very much about DI here, and I have seen Doug and others blunder past it without any specific knowledge of the program.  These reactions are typical when a pre thought ideology has control of one’s mind.

There’s something else going on here.  This program is being credited to Deming who is the ‘father’ of Kaizen, he developed the quality concepts that Toyota later adopted, and then spent much of his career in Japan where he is revered.  And as a remarkable coincidence, we talked about Kaizen just yesterday on this blog.

There’s a lot of material on the site that Ms. Huber pointed us to, and much of it looks like the usual constructionist rhubarb.  But “parents have been kept in the dark” is totally opposite to everything that Deming taught. 

Kaizen practitioners don’t come in and say ‘This is how you should run your facility’, but rather ‘Here are some skills that will help you improve your facility yourselves.’  Kaizen is hard work; both parents and students would absolutely have to be a part of that process.

Be very skeptical.

As a parent, I have strong objections to the statement below:
” For example, the eight-year-old and upwards children are given worksheets at the beginning of each week in numeracy and literacy and instructed to work through them on their own. If they have any questions, they are to ask four peers before going to the teacher. The children are then required to self-assess their work. If they do not complete the work satisfactorily, they are required to do it at home on the weekends without parental support. To date, parents have been kept completely in the dark.”

There has been some weird stuff going on in the classrooms of K to 12, that are treating children/students as if they are little adults, with adult minds. I have search for the last two hours, and let us make one thing clear, Direct Instruction is far superior to the Quality Learning Approach and the many other versions based on Dr. W. Edwards Deming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Lean Education Enterprises is another outfit based on Dr. Deming’s work.  A White paper called - Doing More With Less - Going Lean in Education
http://www.leaneducation.com/whitepaper-DoingMoreWithLess.pdf

From Quality Learning Australia - Enough about WHAT
school excellence looks like!
Now, what about the ‘HOW TO’?
http://www.acel.org.au/conf07/papers/King and Kovacs.pdf

Another paper - Quality in Education
According to the Teachings of
Deming and Feuerstein
http://growthmindseteaz.org/files/Feuersteinanddeming.pdf

Dr. Feuerstein - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuven_Feuerstein

Both Deming and Feuerstein approaches are proponents of no testing and no grades, and as such have attracted a gathering of educators of different shapes and sizes.

From what I read, its a management approach where the children become responsible for their own learning. The philosophy behind it, is to have children learn to learn, by having the school management provide the resources and skills to learn to learn. The teacher acts as the facilitator, and the parents are removed from the process of educating children. However, I have a question? Since children are human beings, would they not take the calculator or go on the web to find the answers to the work sheets?  I know if my children were small today, that is exactly what they would do. Much perfected Direct Instruction,  that eventually leads to full mastery and proficiency of skills, that are crucial to learning new knowledge.

Hi Nancy,  let me try to clarify Deming’s ideas a bit.

You are right, no testing and no grades.  But that would not be lax teaching, but rather flow from the Kaizen environment that requires the student to be competent - and realistically aware of his competency - at every step of learning. 

Direct Instruction is a behaviourist approach to learning, think of it as a specific technique rather than a philosophy.  It also has no need for testing or grades if the instructor simply continues teaching until the student masters the lesson.  (No point in testing since the student has achieved mastery, no point in grades for the same reason.)

I have no idea how Kaizen could be rolled out in a real classroom, it is not easy or obvious.  Perhaps DI would be part of it.  I would love to hear from a Kaizen sensei (teacher) on this.

It’s not that testing is such a great idea.  Our current education system is based on Taylorist principles; we teach a batch of students and then test them, and the defective ones are thrown back.  But schools aren’t prepared to do the hard work required to make testing unnecessary.

I would suspect children with learning difficulties would have a tough row in this type of learning environment. A few months back, my 17 year old came home, ranting about the latest experiment in English and Advance Math, with work sheets. Suffice to say, her response was why bother to go to school, if the teacher is not going to teach. And she was not alone, the class of students did not like it either. Then my 17 year old raises the ultimate reason why this type of learning with worksheets is a bad idea. “If I had wanted this type of learning, I would have signed up for the online course, but I chose to be in a classroom with a teacher.”

The last school year, it has been a series of different experiments in the classroom instruction and practices. All of it done without parents being informed about it in advance. I found it passing strange, considering that they actually expect students to learned on their own, rubrics with scores, that does not show where the student went wrong in his or her writing. As a parent, I could not help my child in her writing, because all I had was scores like 2 out of 5 in grammar. One of the biggest complaints from the students, they had no way of knowing what to improve, looking at a rubric filled with scores. The advanced math class was just as bad, where it was expected the students to help each other out, and not go to the teacher. It doesn’t happen that way in real life. The students just hit the internet for help, when they were stumped. Some students were a bit more lucky having parents that were not as rusty as I was in the higher advance mathematics. By the way, if there was a poll on the two worst teachers - the English and Math teachers would have won hands down. It gets pretty bad, when students including my kid would go to the chemistry teacher for help to sort out a math problem. The chemistry teacher, an excellent teacher does not like what is going on in today’s schools, and was willing to aid the other students.

My point is, the educators would have not only a wide body of subject knowledge, but to work effectively, they would also need a wide breath of knowledge in the sciences of learning, learning problems, and specific knowledge in the learning disorders. My kid would be lost in the classroom, and not really learning anything.

That said, I did check to see if DI is directly connected to the many different versions of the Kaizen environment in education, but I could not find any connections whatsoever. The links I provided had some crumbs to follow, that led me out of the public education system to the individuals connected to big business like Deming. There was other crumbs that led me back to public education system but under teaching philosophies,  methodologies and pedagogy. No big names in public education that I could find, and my best guess at the moment - this new movement is coming from the top levels of the public education system in partnership with the private sector and individuals. Arising out of the teachers faculties that are connected directly to the global education organizations.

I read so much today, most of it is a jumbled in my head, but I did picked up one thing regarding work sheets. that the work sheets may be on an unrelated activity other then the subject at hand. I know I read it at least three times, because the author did not go in details what the unrelated activities might be. I concluded, they must also be drawing from the learning cognitive sciences, for students to work on their cognitive skills that will assist the students in their learning. I related it to my own fun cognitive exercises that I had for my child in the early days and were effective.

This new method is drawing from many different fields and disciplines, but what I don’t get is trying to adapt it all using a one-sized-fits-all approach. Last time I check my own kids, each was unique in the way they learned. However they all loved structure, and never were the type of students that was overly fond of child-centered activities and co-operative learning.

Thank you all for your comments so far.  I think the concepts that have been mentioned (LEAN, & Kiazen) are linked to the QLA company.  I find it extremely interesting that no tests, no grades have been mentioned in the blogs so far, as my three grandchildren who attend the school have not been able to bring home one test paper or completed worksheet.  In such circumstances, I remain unclear about how they are progressing or what they are concepts etc. they are supposed to learn.

QLA has undertaken their own evaluation of the program which clearly does not meet even basic empirical research standards.  Its analogous with a drug company doing its own research and then claiming the drug is the best product on the market. Its scarey that school systems are implementing programs that are not evidence based and that the parents have no knowledge of.

I changed my search terms, and discovered a few more things.

“Higher education discovered total quality management in the 1980s and quickly became enamored of it. Books like TQM for Professors and Students (Bateman and Roberts 1992) and Total Quality Management in Higher Education (Sherr and Teeter 1991) declared that TQM could serve as a paradigm for improving every aspect of collegiate functioning from fiscal administration to classroom instruction. Terms like “customer focus,” “employee empowerment,” “continuous assessment,” and “Deming’s 14 principles” started appearing with regularity in education journals and in administrative pronouncements on campuses all over the country. Deming himself suggested the linkage between quality management principles and education, claiming that “…improvement of education, and the management of education, require application of the same principles that must be used for the improvement of any process, manufacturing or service” (Deming, 1994).”
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/TQM.htm

From Alfie Kohn himself - “Not only am I enthusiastic about the precepts of TQM in a business context, but I believe many of its underlying values resonate with some of the best work in educational theory.  Deming and his followers offer an essentially positive view of human nature, emphasizing people’s fundamental desire to learn and challenge themselves.  They promote democratic environments and shared decision-making.  They stress the benefits of cooperation and the destructive consequences of competition.  They insist that a climate of trust and safety must replace one based on fear.  And they urge the abolition of systems of rating, ranking, and behavioral manipulation, including grades.”
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/tqm.htm

From John Hopkins - School of Education
The author’s background is worth noting - “Lewis A. Rhodes’ career as association executive, consultant to federal and state government, director of national projects for foundations and government, private sector consultant, and as a university faculty member has centered on problems that arise when people try to work together effectively in organizations.”
http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/Transforming Education/Articles/The Profound Knowledge School/

It is hailing and arising from system theories and change theories to ‘quality’ instruction methods to the pedagogy of co-operative learning and its philosophy.

Bottom line, or a question, what happens to the students who are not very good at following instructions on an outline within the co-operative learning environment??  What happens to the students who are not very good at self-evaluation of themselves within the co-operative learning environment??

At least we found out that Alfie Kohn is a great admirer of Deming and his work, and now the only question how many of Kohn’s cohort of no grades and no testing are on the bandwagon of Quality Learning Approach, and its many offshoots?  As for parents, they are left in the dark because they have not figured out what is the parents’ roles.