Quality School Teacher RI

William Glasser, M.D.

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062035288
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

This book is the follow-up to its immediate predecessor, The Quality School. Based on the work of W. Edwards Deming and on Dr. Glasser's own choice theory, it is written for teachers who are trying to abandon the old system of boss-managing, which is effective for less than half of all students. William Glasser, M.D., explains that only through lead-management can teachers create classrooms in which all students not only do competent work but begin to do quality work. These classrooms are the core of a quality school. The book begins by explaining that to persuade students to do quality schoolwork, teachers must first establish warm, totally noncoercive relationships with their students; teach only useful material, which means stressing skills rather than asking students to memorize information; and move from teacher evaluation to student self-evaluation. There are no generalities in this book: It provides the specifics that classroom teachers seek as they begin the move to quality schools.

CHAPTER ONE

Quality School Teachers Always Lead, They Never Boss

This book is addressed to teachers who are working in schools where there is tangible interest in the quality school ideas. But it is equally useful to teachers who may not teach in such schools but want to put these ideas into operation in their own classrooms. It is apparent to me, from the perspective of almost ten years of teaching these ideas, that teachers and administrators are having great difficulty making the basic change that all teachers and administrators must make if their classroom or their school is to move to quality. They must stop boss-managing and start lead-managing and remember the words of W. Edwards Deming: “Knowledge is prediction, and knowledge comes from theory. Experience teaches nothing without theory. Do not try to copy someone else’s success. Unless you understand the theory behind it, trying to copy it can lead to complete chaos.”²

The managers, which in a school would be the administrators and teachers, resist a move to lead-management because they fear that, if they go along with what Deming says, they will have to give up power. They find it hard to realize that it is the personal power associated with bossing that is the enemy of the quality they are trying to achieve.

Before any school can become a quality school, the principal has to commit to the new system—lead-management—and, by leading instead of bossing, convince the teachers that he or she has actually made the commitment. The next step is for the teachers to stop bossing and start leading their students and, in doing so, demonstrate to them that something new and better is going on in their classrooms. Both these steps are difficult steps, but, in practice, the principals have an easier job than the teachers.

The principal’s main task in a quality school is to lead-manage teachers who have already shown a strong interest in learning to do this themselves and appreciate all the help they can get as they start. Teachers, on the other hand, have to both manage and teach students, many of whom don’t even want to be in school, and none of whom will show much interest in what system of management you use or, initially, have much interest in helping you do anything. To reach these students is what this book is all about, and to help you to do this, your principal needs to do more than allow you to change. He or she must vigorously support all you do as you try to implement the lead-management ideas in this book.

Until your students can be convinced that something new and better for them is happening in your classroom, they will not seriously consider putting forth the effort it takes to do quality schoolwork. Some of your students have done good schoolwork, but for almost all students quality work is a completely new idea. They have never even thought of doing it, much less done it. Initially, they will perceive quality work as being too hard, and most will resist. They will continue to resist until you teach them first what quality is and then that they can do quality schoolwork. This will be your main task as a quality school teacher.

The most powerful thing you can do to convince your students that something new is in place is to talk to them much more than most of you have ever done before. As you talk to them, in a variety of ways, tell them that it is their school, not your school, the principal’s school, or their parents’ school. By their school, you mean that nothing is going to be forced upon them, that together you will agree on what is useful to learn, and that you will work with them to solve all problems because, if it is their school, the problems are their problems. You will have to work hard to prevent them from turning their problems over to you, as they are used to doing.

To do this best, you will have to get rid of the standard rectangular classroom configuration of rows and change to a new configuration, a circle, with you as a part of it. The purpose of the circle is for you to be able, on a moment’s notice, to get their attention and start discussing anything that is important. In the standard arrangement, unless you are a communications genius, you cannot reach beyond the first two rows. If you can’t reach them, the students will never accept that this is their school. I am aware that there will be tremendous resistance to changing the way students sit. You should clear this with your principal and then be prepared to sweet-talk your custodian for a number of weeks if you want to get him or her to go along.

As you are already aware from what I have written, the success of our boss-managed, traditional schools, where few students perceive ownership, is much more related to the homes the students come from than to what happens in school. Even this success is not high. In the best schools, which means schools where there is the most family support, no more than half the students do good work: Almost none do quality work. In communities where there is little family support for education, the number of students who do good work may drop to as low as 5 percent: Quality work is almost nonexistent. The goal of a quality school is all students doing some quality work. The school, as much as or more than the family, has to convince the students that it is a worthwhile effort.

Until the late 1970s, the majority of our political leaders were satisfied with our schools. There was no pressure to fix what did not seem to be broken. Now, very suddenly, they have become aware that not nearly enough students get good grades or score well on achievement tests. This awareness has led to the present hue and cry to improve the schools. But there is no hue and cry for quality. The pressure is to improve achievement on mass tests, but even this has failed because, so far, almost all the suggested improvements are tied to the old teach and test, reward and punish, boss-managed system.

After twenty years of unsuccessful struggle, all we have accumulated is a pile of evidence that our traditional boss-managed system has taken the schools as far as it can. If we do not change from bossing to leading, the schools will not improve by any standard, even the nonstandard of low-quality, mass achievement tests. But worst of all, the students will not learn to do the quality work they must do if our society is to be economically competitive in the next century. We do not have the luxury of planning for a distant future: We must make these changes now.

Even most of the schools that say they are now trying to follow Deming or have embraced the wonderful-sounding abbreviation TQM (total quality management) are getting nowhere, because their administrators and school boards seem unable to understand that, to use Deming’s ideas successfully, they have to do as he says: “Change the system!” Educators are far from alone in their inability to understand Deming. The reluctance to accept that the system must be changed also extends to leaders of industry, many of whom have recently become involved with the schools.

In their call for more testing, coupled with the implied threat that schools that do not measure up will be punished or shut down, most of these businessmen turned educators cling to the worst features of boss-management, strong evidence that they have missed Deming’s main point. Whether the failure to achieve quality is in industry or education, nothing will be improved until the leaders change the system itself. It is never the fault of the people who work in the system.

To try to help you to see what I mean, let me use a simple household example of how difficult it is to change from an old system to a new one. Almost all of you are aware of the claims that are made for new dishwashers: You do not have to do anything more than scrape off the food before you put the dishes in to wash. We all know that most people with a new dishwasher do much more than scrape; they prewash the dishes before putting them in the machine. They do this because they have always done it. They are not able to conceptualize that these new machines are equipped with a new dishwashing system that is capable of doing exactly what is claimed. So they keep prewashing by hand, sticking to the old system, because they cannot conceptualize the new.

While it is much more complicated, the problem of moving from bossing to leading is the same as giving up prewashing. If you can accept the ideas of Deming and choice theory and then lead-manage and lead-teach accordingly, all students will begin to do good work and discipline problems will disappear. It is hard to believe this is true. Just as many of our industrial leaders, whose industries make low-quality products and are failing to compete, cannot conceptualize Deming enough to stop boss-managing, too many teachers are also stuck in the old system.

For example, teachers who are trying to use the new quality school lead-managing system keep asking, “But what do I do if I don’t punish them when they don’t do the work I assign?” Instead of accepting the idea that all students not only can but will begin to do better work (better in the beginning, quality later) if they are not punished or threatened, they keep asking the same question and keep punishing. They cannot conceptualize the choice theory that underlies lead-management, which is that their students are not doing the assigned work because they do not find it need-satisfying. Following the old boss-managed system, teachers can’t rid their minds of the thought, “I know what I tell them to do is good for them. They ought to do it whether they like it or not.”

I am well aware, however, that teachers who really want to change are not staying with the old system because they are stubborn. They simply don’t know enough about the new system to get a working understanding of what it is. To help them, I have written a lot, but it is still not enough. Deming had the same problem. At ninety-three years old he could cite as examples many businesses in Japan to prove that what he said works in industry; still, he was much less successful than he would like to have been in this country.³

I wish we had a large, successful school model comparable to what he has with business in Japan, but we do not. Some of the schools that have signed the contract are getting close, however. It is encouraging that he and I are busy explaining quality management over and over to people in this country: These people are aware that they need new ideas desperately. It is discouraging that so many people are so stuck in the old system that they seem unable to catch on to the fact that, if quality is what is wanted, the system is obsolete.

To change a traditional system, such as how we manage people, is a massive job. It requires much more than any of us think is necessary. The salesperson who sold you the new dishwasher could come to your house every night for a week, put the barely scraped dishes in, wait until they are washed, take them out sparkling clean, and ask you to begin doing what you have just seen with your own eyes, and you would still have difficulty doing it. If you are not vigilant, you will slip back into the prewashing that you’ve done for years. If you start the move to lead-managing, it will take even more vigilance to keep from slipping back to old, coercive ways to teach.

Because the boss-managed school is much more fixed in your heads than prewashing dishes, the main thrust of this book is to suggest several specific teaching practices that will help you to lead-manage. I realize that much of what I am going to offer will be new to you, but it has to be if it is to work in the new system. What should be encouraging is that, in the experience of professionals like yourselves who have tried them, these practices are easier and more enjoyable than what you are doing now.

The only way education is going to change is if the classroom teacher makes it happen. Here at the beginning, I want to emphasize that what I recommend, even urge, are suggestions: Nothing in this book should be considered mandatory. Using my knowledge of both choice theory and Deming, I will try to explain the reasons for what I suggest and make clear why it has a good chance of working for you. If what I have written makes sense, think about it, and then slowly and carefully try to put it into practice. There is no hurry. It takes time to become a quality school teacher.

CHAPTER TWO

The Quality School Teacher Is a Professional

Assuming you will be managed by administrators who understand what a quality school is, almost all of you will find that, for the first time in your career, you will have the opportunity to be a professional teacher. In any field, and this certainly should include teaching school, professionals not only know how to do the job they are hired to do, but they are also given an opportunity to do that job the way they believe is best. For example, if you are hired as a professional to teach fifth grade, you will make sure that you are clear on what you are expected to accomplish, but you will be equally sure that you will be given the opportunity to use your professional skills to do so.

Therefore, how a professional accomplishes the job is up to that person. This does not mean that you are not open to suggestions and learning new and better ways to practice your profession, but it does mean that you are not compelled to follow anyone’s lead except your own. Within the boundaries of your assignment, you figure out your own curriculum, use the materials you think are best in the way you believe is most effective, use any method of teaching, such as cooperative learning, that you think will work, and figure out how to evaluate your students so that they show you, themselves, and anyone else that they have learned what they are supposed to learn in your class. In short, if you accept the assignment, it is yours to accomplish.

The most important difference between professionals and nonprofessionals in any field goes far beyond being able to do the job without outside direction: It is that professionals are interested in quality. The work they do themselves is quality, and, if they manage or teach others, it is important to them that they do quality work. Getting the job done, even done well, is good enough for nonprofessionals, but continually improving the way the job is done both for themselves and others is the hallmark of professionals.

A professional teacher would not ask any student to do anything that is not quality, so all of the nonsensical memorizing that teachers now require their students to do would be absent from a quality school. Teaching public school students so that they do quality work is almost nonexistent in our schools, where teachers and students are boss-managed. If this is to be accomplished it will only be through the leadership of professional teachers who make the effort to learn to become lead-managers.

As traditional schools operate now, teachers are not treated as professionals. Everyone, administrators, school boards, state departments, and the legislature, and the governors’ offices, has a hand in telling teachers what they want done, how to do it, and how it will be measured. There is no job that requires professionals more than teaching, yet there is no job in which the people who do it are treated in ways that make it impossible for them to be professional. Imagine what medicine or law would be like if physicians and lawyers were treated as teachers are. Teaching well is certainly much more difficult than performing well in either of these more respected professions.

A high school science teacher in one of our consortium schools⁴ told me that for the first time in his career he is acting as a professional. His principal is encouraging him and all of her teachers to teach the way they think is best. He has decided to follow many of the suggestions in The Quality School, and he says the results are phenomenal: All his students are learning science enthusiastically and doing better work than they have ever done before, even quality work. But he is worried because he is not covering as much as he tried to cover in the past (actually, he never succeeded, because it was too much to cover), and he tells me that he fears he will be fired if his present principal leaves and is replaced by a traditional principal.

Although I doubt it will happen, I agreed that it could. In a lighter vein, I also said that if he feels threatened by a new principal, he knows how to teach unprofessionally, how to turn students off and spend his time dealing with discipline problems (these have all disappeared); if he has to, he can go back to where he was. He smiled and said he’ll take his chances with what he is doing now. Most of what he is saying is that it takes a while to get comfortable with a new system. He had taught the old system for fifteen years, the new one for less than a year. He was also using his fear to brag a little about what he has accomplished. He has every right to be proud of it.

What he is saying is more complicated than it seems. Why is he one of the few teachers out of a large faculty (over seventy teachers), all of whom have the opportunity to do what he has done, who have not availed themselves of lead-management to the extent he has? The answer is that it is hard to do, and that was why he was bragging a little. As much as many teachers say they want to be treated as professionals, when it happens, as it will in a quality school, it is not going to be easy.

It is much easier to chafe against all the constraints, to gripe about the inadequate textbooks, the unfair state tests, the mandated coverage of so much ground, and the strong suggestion that some ways to teach are preferred over others. This is easier than to accept the responsibility to change. Teachers will have many difficult adjustments to make when they are given the opportunity to become professionals and move from bossing to leading. This book is addressed to teachers who, given the opportunity, want to become professionals.

In a quality school, if asked, it would be your responsibility as a professional teacher to write out a brief summary of what you propose to teach and how you propose to show that your students have learned what you are teaching them t...