Monday, October 15, 2007

Reinvention

Business folks use the term "reinvention" a lot. As we see the reinvention of autos (hybrids, etc) and energy (solar, wind, etc) and other areas, I think maybe it is time for us to reinvent education. Business is a competitive world - either compete for what people need or you close your doors. Service businesses are the same, either provide an appropriate service for the cost or you won't be in business very long. We should be much more like quality services in education. So what is it that stops us.....? I don't think we see ourselves as quality service providers, nor do we connect much to the outcome we get. That is why I think accountability is a good thing - we need to take responsibilty for the service we provide. Unfortunately, the policy being written for education is more about compliance to method than accountability to outcome.
There are a lot of teachers being very successful with student performance and outcome. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot more that are not. We need to provide the very best service to our students and when the servce provider is not succesful, there are only two choices - personal improvement or discontinuance of service.
Leadership is the key to looking at what we do as high quality services. We can, and must be held accountable for the services we provide (there are no excuses and it is not the students fault.) When we take responsibility for the outcomes and learn new ways to improve our skillsets, we will be successful!

3 comments:

Karen Renee said...

Reinvention ~ That's what we need in the symposium presentation!

Markel said...

I agree, Patrick (as unpopular as it may be). We have to be accountable to our constituents. No one likes the idea of their future being determined by their students' testing success. Through this course, I've surmised that perhaps we're measuring the wrong thing. Could it be that if we measure the right elements (i.e. higher order thinking skills), a teacher who knows they're doing a good job will not feel as threatened? Of course there are tradeoffs with this stance. But someone has to take a stand. We can't just continue with a 'business as usual' mentality. Isn't insanity expecting a different outcome while doing the same thing?

Devon Hodgson said...

All organizations are sociotechnical systems in which the manner of external adaptation and the solution of internal integration problems are interdependent and intertwined (Schein, 2002). We must identify the external forces that control leaders and help them to manage internal adaptation in our presentation. Inspiration won't happen without tangible ideas of how to serve all consituents (or customers).