Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Quality control ignores creativity

Quality control fixes everything in static IF THEN format rules, but what about creativity? The systematic flaw of quality management is it's disability to recognize what it does not know.

What about creativity?

My husband who works in education told me this very smart metaphor for building a curriculum. Imagine we put all quality content in a curriculum in bricks to build the curriculum building. All bricks are labelled for content: A, B, and so on. Then we look at the heap and everyone that went through the pile of bricks gets the certificate. But if we take a look at the heap, it is no building, just a heap. A building is characterized by the relationships between the bricks, it is not merely a heap of excellent building material.

Now look again at parameters.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

An alternative quality improvement strategy is to measure and reward outcomes without prescribing the process for achieving them. It's a sort of simulated marketplace: whichever innovative approaches win the competition becomes models to be emulated. This strategy demands (a) that the stakeholders agree on which outcomes are important and (b) that the measures accurately evaluate those results.

In the US there are a lot of "charter" schools. These schools are paid for by tax dollars, but planned and organized locally to offer alternatives. As a result there can be a lot of diversity in goals, pedagogy, curriculum, etc. So far the outcome measures don't show demonstrably superior results for the charter schools. Still, as long as results aren't clearly worse, why not offer the choice?

Odile S said...

My husband also suggests a very simple way to improve education: a raise of salaries.

Anonymous said...

Good one! Does he think he would be a better teacher if they paid him more?

Odile S said...

Well, he meant school-education, he is a dr.
The truth is he is intrinsically motivated and wants to create something that is good.

Getting a reward is not bad, but it is not the reason for working better.
What he meant is that higher salaries will mean higher education of the teachers.

*new* item at Chez Odile is the metachat where Creatives and Thinkers meet.

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