Deming Institute Education Conference

Notes I took at the conference

• Resources
  • Langford Learning, Inc.
    • Contact them to find a training near you, especially for a school board!
  • Deming.org
  • facebook.com/Deming.Institute
  • Deming’s 14 Points
  • How Motivation is Driven by Purpose and Not Monetary Incentives
  • Deming’s Road to Continual Improvement
  • W. Edwards Deming – Rare Full-Length Interview – February 1984
  • Dr. Deming – The 5 Deadly Diseases 1984

• Day 1
  • 8:15 – Early Morning Session
    • Kevin Cahill
      • Deming’s grandson
      • Common Sense
        • Decisions were made on common sense
        • Need to look at problems differently
      • Videos
        • Quality or Else
        • VIDEO: If Japan Can, Why Can’t We (1:16:38)
        • Book about quality
    • David Langford – Why Deming in Education
      • 0:13 Video of Mt. Edgecumbe High School
      • 11:05 Deming’s 3 principles he always started with
        1. Have fun
        2. Learning something
        3. Make a difference
      • 13:00 Quality is about the transformation of the individual
        • Don’t just get rid of the bad ones
        • He told the story of his school
          • Mt. Edgecumbe High School
        • When you get a hammer, everything looks like a nail
        • Attended Deming seminars
        • Deming: People have a right to joy in their work
          • Students have a right to joy in their learning
        • Deming: Move from extrinsic motivations to intrinsic
      • 25:58 EXERCISE: Trace hand on a piece of paper – PROFOUND LEARNING
        • One needs to have profound knowledge before they make real change
        • 

• • • • • 27:40 System
          • What system are we working within?
          • Do they empower or neutralize power?
          • Seldom do we ask what is wrong with this system that is producing poor results? – Change it!
          • In the name of trying to make things better, often make it worse – don’t create games for kids to play in a system
        • 28:57 Theory
          • What is your theory of education?
          • Many people don’t have a clear theory
          • Many theories are based on unfounded ideas
          • “Bonus” thinking narrows: What do I need to do to get an “A”?
          • Dr. Deming said most people don’t know what their job is
          • STORY: Tardy Czar at Texas high school
          • STORY: Where do we get numbers for tardies, consequences, etc. – Deming answered:  séances (Joke: Langford called them board meetings)
          • What is the grading scale based upon? Is it a game? Play the game or else
          • Langford’s son’s rationale that he could go skiing 9 times during a semester
        • 37:40 Variation
          • What does data-driven mean?
          • What is the data telling you?
          • What are going to do with it?
          • Where is it coming from?
          • Do we understand the variability within the data?
          • What’s the average performance?
          • JOKE: Many teachers have taken a vow of statistical abstinence
          • JOKE: Teacher says, ‘I don’t do numbers.”
        • 39:32 Psychology
          • Do we really understand the psychological effects of our policies?
            • Tardy policies – 3 absences allowed – why?
          • Why are we learning this?
            • If we say to pass the test, it’s not learning, it’s the game of school
          • Fundamental attribution error
            • attributing a fault or defect to the individual without first understanding what is going on systemically
          • Easy to blame the students for being unmotivated and failure
          • There really isn’t extrinsic motivation, it’s extrinsic activation
            • An individual can be activated if the punishment or reward is strong enough
            • As soon as the activation is taken away the behavior goes right back to where it was before
          • Humans are born with about 100 billion neurons
          • The brain will only make neural connections for survival
            • Cramming for the test is short-term survival
        • 44:22 Brain Research
          • Neural Science and Deming video (4:25) – JW Wilson
          • JW Wilson presents activating the learning code in the video toward the bottom of this blog post
          • Where are the students going after they leave school?
          • We want students who will add value to society
          • When Langford started at Mt. Edgecombe only 2% of students who graduated finished college
          • When he left the school they were up to 60% and recently he said they were to 80%
          • Developing student capacity to be successful is the goal
          • Some universities have freshmen dropout rates as high as 60-70%
            • Students don’t know how to think, plan, change situations, or adapt to the current situation
        • Sample Hand at Instagram
          • I drew mine backward, systems should be on the thumb
      • 50:26 EXERCISE: Trace the other hand – INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
        • How do you change extrinsic motivation into intrinsic motivation so people want to do the work?
        • 
      • • 51:15 Naval Academy story – because it will be on the test
        • 53:59 EXERCISE: Try to move the person next to you with one finger
          • Doesn’t work
          • Take all fingers and make a fist
            • Now you can make someone move
            • This is what happens in systems
              • If you change only one thing (one finger) it’s hard to make a change, but with all parts (fist) you can make a change
        • 55:34 Control / Autonomy
          • Teachers can be control freaks
          • Langford was a band teacher
          • Drive out fear
            • No public humiliation
            • Fear is an extrinsic motivation
          • Most asked questions: All student questions come to
            1. What are we doing?
            2. How are we doing it?
            3. Why are we doing this?
          • The Deming way is to think, how can I run the class so kids don’t have to ask these questions
          • Ungrateful (Students/Teachers) Syndrome
          • Stop planning FOR people and start planning WITH them
          • Takes, at a minimum, 19 days to break a neural network pattern, habit
          • Whole lot more fun to plan WITH people, not FOR them
            • Shift the workload to everyone, not just you
        • 1:03:36 Cooperation
          • Ask the question: Do we need other people to get results?
          • We need other people to get results
          • Cooperation is built into the human genome
          • If you want to see people get much more intrinsically motivated, change the cooperation level
          • QUESTION: Do you actually need other people to reach your result?
          • Traditionally in education, we isolate students
          • Deming said if you want to achieve at a much higher level, teach people to cooperate at a much higher level
          • Took Michael Jordan 5 to 6 years to realize that he was on a team
          • Mt. Edgecombe did integrated projects across departments that had long-term results
          • Robot basketball doubled student interest in the program, STEM before STEM
          • Early Internet messaging to help each other
          • Special needs students learned to advocate for themselves and ask for help
        • 1:09:39 Support
          • STORY: Employee of the Month story
            • Don’t have student/employee of the month
            • Outcome: 1 winner and 999 losers
          • Help kids master work
            • Support attends/failure
            • Otherwise, students give up
          • Want them to try and be rewarded for trying by helping to get better
          • QUESTION: Do we have some method for communicating how students are doing?
          • 5 – 10% of kids getting good grades are the ones motivated by grades
            • 90% it is not a motivator
          • Kids de-motivate by saying, ‘What do I need to do to get a “C”
            • They may love sports/music/arts and want to work in their gifted area to get grades so they can keep doing what they love
          • Stop working with words like DEADLINES – has the word DEAD in it
          • Turn deadlines into TARGET DATES
            • What happens if you don’t meet the target date – YOU GET… HELP! 🙂
              • Relentless Help!
          • Understand the neural science – time is the only variable to success
            • Some need more time
        • 1:17:19 Meaning
          • Is it meaningful?
          • If it’s not meaningful, people don’t care
          • If you understand the student’s MEANING NETWORK, you can tie a lot to it
          • EXAMPLE: 4 ft 9-inch passionate basketball player – can tie statistics and other sophisticated math
          • Why are we doing this / learning this?
          • EXAMPLE: Naval Academy cheating scandal
            • What would cause 165 students to cheat?
            • Not defective people, it’s a defective system
            • Students ranked 1 to 1000
            • Rank results in the quality of the post-school assignment
          • EXAMPLE: Retirement center writing project each year
            • High level of meaning for the community, people, and students
          • Need to connect with student interests for them to find meaning
        • 1:21:44 Challenge
          • Is the work challenging?
          • Set too high or low and it demotivates
          • The teacher should be teaching students how manage their own pace and challenge as they go
            • It’s the student’s challenge to meet the target date
            • It’s the student’s challenge to meet the high level of standards
            • The student is going through that
          • Teach students to use Gantt charts, flow charts, and other processes and ways to manage the workload, portfolio assessments, etc.
          • The teacher is going to help the student manage this
          • The whole time students are in a highly cooperative environment, too for more support
          • AND the student is going to have control over the process
        • Sample Hand at Flickr
      • VIDEO: Deming talking about motivation
      • VIDEO: Key & Peele – TeachingCenter
  • Break 10:10 – 15
  • 10:25 – Late Morning Session
    • Jane Kovacs and Michael King
      • Finding joy in learning: Apply Deming’s theory to schools in Australia
      • Their web site: www.qla.com.au
        • Resources Page
          • Many templates on this page
      • Their book: Improving Learning: A how-to guide for school improvement
      • Shared Lotus diagram
      • 9,389 schools in Australia
        • 2/5 are in private schools
        • Little improvement in learning over the last 10 years
        • Students aren’t happy
        • Teachers and other stakeholders are not happy
        • Over the last decade increased investment by 43%
      • Reviewed Principles of Quality Learning document
      • Reviewed Systems Map
      • Shared some of their videos
        • Watched a school team learn the PDSA process
          • 10 minutes
      • Examined data on charts looking at variations in student self-assess learning engagement
      • Watched students working with capacity matrices
  • Lunch 11:45 – 1:00
  • 1:00 Early Afternoon
    • Bone Diagram introduced
    • Christine Simpson (Middle School) and Sarah Ambrus (High School) from Leander SD Austin, TX
      • Leander MS
      • Leander HS
      • Many resources at https://twitter.com/hashtag/deming2015
    • Jake Rodgers and Phyllis Tubbs
      • Principal at Gold Bar Elementary
      • Jake shared his love of data charts
  • Break 3:15-3:30
  • 3:30 – Late Afternoon
    • Dr. Lisa L. Snyder
      • Lakeville Public Schools, Minneapolis, MN
      • Twitter @LAPSSuper
      • Talked about Culture of Innovation and Empowerment
      • We are in the knowledge economy now
      • Shared video about Impact Academy
      • Data about Impact Academy results
      • Shared video about MNCAPS – career preparation for students

• Day 2
  • 8:30 Early Morning Session
    • Alfie Kohn
      • Book: No Contest: The Case Against Competition
      • Cooperation vs. competition speech
        • follow Twitter feed #deming2015
      • 2:16 Introduction
      • 4:39 1st caveat: worried about workplace analogies and the classroom
      • 6:36 2nd caveat: understand how revolutionary Deming’s ideas are and the current fear-based learning environment
  • Break 10:20
  • 10:35 – Late Morning Session
    • Linda Lippe from Leander School District
      • Lead us in a science experiment with two cups of water and red food coloring
    • LISD Learning Model

• JW Wilson – Executive Director, Advanced Learning Institute
  • Cracking the Learning Code
    • Video introduction
  • Profound Learning Ecosystem
  • 29:27 Teachers have the answers
  • 31:21 The higher the extrinsic motivation the lower the IQ
  • 32:59 Land’s Study Asks Are We Killing Creativity?