Langford International, Inc.

Doug Stilwell is Superintendent in Urbandale, IA. He recently addressed the Probletunity of weather related school closing. I will let Doug explain the process. I want to address the Profound Knowledge behind what Doug is attempting. The Taguchi Loss Function tells us that the further we move away from optimum the greater the loss. In this case, loses can be unknown and unknowable. How do we count the loses of parents not being notified on time and spending time and effort to get kids to school only to find that it is closed? How do we quantify the loses when weather causes an accident that could have been avoided with timely notification? Combining system thinking, psychology, statistical variation and knowledge works together to create optimization of a system. Doug can you explain the process?

“Here is the loss function I did for weather related school closings. Please go ahead and post. You may certainly cite Urbandale as the school district.” – Doug Stilwell

Excellent Doug. Thank you. We also call it the Three Bears Method.

Hi. having applied Deming and others to schools as organisations, it seems sad that school leaders are hardly trained at all (at least in the UK) in leading a complex organisation like a school. Our training system is more like learning compliance to a centralised system that does not work! It is fortunate that so many school leaders are resiliant and gifted. For me I find the following inter-related and intertwining areas assumed or absent in UK schools (same as US?) but all are the secret of success and the release of creative talent. These are Systems Thinking itself. Customer Care in a very wide sense and Group Loyalty Psychology. it would take an age to explain how I got to this point but it is not far from the comments above. For me Vertical Tutoring is the only active organisational learning culture that makes a learning ‘system’ operationally supported and coherent from end to end.

Hi David
Please appreciate that I feel a little behind the curve here.
When I look at the school as a system, everything and everybody tends to be organised horizontally, in years. Children arrive as members of already powerful loyalty groups that massively influence their ‘openess to learning and experience’ (home, the gang, the area, the class etc). Schools tend to accept and absorb these and add to the difficulties this often negative membership influence can pose through assumptions about school transfer, partnership and even teaching and learning (and so on). The school too often fails to successfully intervene to form more supportive and positive loyalty groups around students (I call these learning relationships eg tutor, parent child) because horizontal systems are far too rigid as systems. In fact, there is a danger of making things worse, something I have found in every one of the 200 schools that I have worked with to change their learning culture. To compensate, we invent pastoral support and counselling (a sort of student repair shop). In effect the system is the wrong way round in schools. We repair rather than prepare and support. We then end up with all the right people all in the right place and all doing the wrong job…in part. Vertical Tutoring is a front office system whereby the student base or tutor group or home group comprises all-age students who meet daily with their group tutor for (say) 25 minutes. The activities in that time tend to be learning related (support of and preparation for, learning) and conversational. Older students take on leadership roles. The school is organised with this vertical support system as the key driver for learning and for the whole school as an effective system. It is known in the US but not in the way i would advise (as far as I know). The tutor does NOT and Should NOT DELIVER PROGRAMMES in my book. The time is too important for that. This system also builds a critical partnership (learning relationship) with parents.

Hope this helps!

Hi Peter.
I am interested in your reflections on the UK educations system. We have similar problems here in Australia with an over emphasis on delivering programs rather than focussing on learning. We also tend to miss out on the benefit of systems thinking and social phychology – to which you refer. Deming’s SoPK really provides a guiding light – but we really do have to transform the exising system of management. This web site can help us build the critical mass.