In Cormier’s post, his main topic is Sustainability and Stewardship, specifically of a digital strategy project in a K-12 system. He focused on his perspective as a digital strategist for K-12 education in Canada and talked about the points of view of teachers and school divisions, as well as strategists like himself. He also talked about parents’ involvement in education and how they are leveraging new tools. He admitted that he has not addressed students in his thoughts on student experiences, however. His thoughts are more around the challenges of digital citizenship after the implementation of tools designed to assist a technology problem. They were able to identify the teachers’ need for better search tools, but in doing so they realized that innovation was happening and that required digital citizenship tools as well. He likened this to pulling a thread on a sweater to fix that part of the sweater, then ending up with a torn sweater.
In this case, his post fits into the “Role Perspectives” element, and I would like to challenge my thinking to consider this as a workplace element, with the issues element of legality and confidentiality layered on the workplace. Teachers are, after all, workers first. Solving a problem as a group of workers rather than a group of teachers, considering the need to protect student confidentiality, would yield a different solution, I think. Teachers in the system that Cormier described had just been endowed with a large investment of hardware (and possibly software to complement it?) and needed help figuring out how to best deploy it to meet some of their needs. As Cormier pointed out, “#techcharlatans” (Cormier, 2017, para. 1) have overpromised and underdelivered for a long time. As Weiner (2009, p. 5) pointed out, “outcomes are perhaps the least theorized and least studied aspect of organizational readiness for change”. Combine those two ideas, and we have a recipe for poorly designed goals for workplace technology that has the potential for great wastage of tax dollars, given that Cormier stated explicitly that he was dealing with the public school system. If the search system that was being designed by Cormier and his team had been designed instead with a corporate lens with accountability for money spent, the end product would have been quite different, I would argue.
Refererences:
Cormier, D. Our schools aren’t broken, they’re hard – Dave’s Educational Blog. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2022, from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2017/12/08/our-schools-arent-broken-theyre-hard/
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(67).
In rethinking how I would use analytics data to reassess my solution, I would specifically use Total Quality Management (TQM) principles. These principles could be used in public education to better inform government decisions and the resulting teachers’ work by first understanding the needs of the system to drive change inputs. This would reduce the question to one of unemotional analysis and protect privacy by its nature. Educational facilities, at least in the context of the RAND report (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006), are already being seen as workplaces: factories, in fact. They are also often publicly funded factories, with all the limitations and scrutiny that come with that. They are under immense pressure to deliver a good product. In this case, the product is the student.
They call it Data Driven Decision Making (DDDM), but it amounts to the use of lagging indicators like progress tests from “commercial test providers” (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006), that sound like they could be very similar to Cormier’s “#techcharlatans” (Cormier, 2017, para 1). These products purport to help decision-makers measure worker (e.g. teacher) efficiency that then allows governments at various levels to create “school improvement plans” (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006, p. 6) to make the production of a successful student (the definition of successful and its associated politics is for another time). As I went through this unit’s readings, I could not help but think of TQM methods like Lean Six Sigma but applied to the operation of a school. LeMaheiu et al cite the “pressure to increase productivity while often dealing with declining funding” (2017, p. 94) in their analysis of quality improvement in education. Cormier’s work as a digital strategist mirrored this. He needed to help a public-school division find a way to efficiently use a new endowment of hardware. School divisions are the board of directors of a factory who hire teacher-workers to use the factory tools at hand to create a better product: the student.
My original post referred to a Canadian project in which Cormier (2017) was involved, but there are enough similarities in schools between Canada and the United States of America (USA) that the analogy from the RAND report (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006) should hold for both (OECD, 2019). A basic principle of TQM is that there are always opportunities for “continuous improvement” (Omachonu & Ross , 2004, p. 3). This can also be applied in thinking about the way that students are viewed as products of the educational system. The difference in analytics that I would take now would be to the deciding of what to teach so that the output of the school is a more efficient adult worker. While education for the sake of learning is one possible outcome, ultimately a society needs effective, informed workers. I would like to turn the first implication of RAND around. If “effective decision making” (Marsh, Pane, & Hamilton, 2006, p. 10), is the goal, then the output needs to be better defined so that the inputs can be better designed. It is not romantic, nor is it what I personally feel that education should or could be, but it is practical, given the scale of public education and, often, corporate training.
References:
Cormier, D. Our schools aren’t broken, they’re hard – Dave’s Educational Blog. (n.d.). Retrieved February 13, 2022, from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2017/12/08/our-schools-arent-broken-theyre-hard/
LeMahieu, P. G., Nordstrum, L. E., & Cudney, E. A. (2017). Six Sigma in education. Quality Assurance in Education, 25(1), 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1108/QAE-12-2016-0082
Marsh, J., Pane, J., & Hamilton, L., (2006). Making Sense of Data-Driven Decision Making in Education: Evidence from Recent RAND Research. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.
OECD (2019), PISA 2018 Assessment and Analytical Framework, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/b25efab8-en.
Omachonu, V. K., & Ross, J. E. (2004). Principles of total quality. Crc Press.
Both of these posts highlight the need to create more actionable goals in the education system, particularly from a more corporate lens.
Corrie (2022) states in the second post that schools need to be more direct in their goals for students, arguing that clear goals would create efficient adult workers. While Corrie uses the RAND and TQM theories to support the argument, some school districts are moving away from clearly defined outcomes and focusing more on competencies (BC Ministry of Education, n.d.).
Another aspect that is not taken into account is teacher autonomy. Corrie’s (2022) suggestion of clearly defined goals and outcomes would need to be adopted and approved by provincial teachers’ unions and could take considerable time and effort to enforce.
While a corporate outlook would be well-defined and focused on outputs, it could be a time-intensive and conflict-inducing affair.
BC Ministry of Education, (n.d.). https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/rethinking-curriculum
Corrie, (2022, February 27). One thought on “Not Just a School, But Also a Workplace”.