Kelly's Curriculum Corner

There was such a great response to the Dwindling Owl Population in India root cause story that I decided to share a few more. We were initially inspired by Paul Preuss’ book, School Leaders Guide to Root Cause Analysis . He had some sample root cause stories within his book. We kicked off our event with the Boat Accident example. We have participants read the story and then brainstorm root cause. What’s interesting is that folks almost always blame the family – sound familiar? However, if we stop our problem-solving with the family, nothing changes. If we start to see the organization, in this case the coast guard as culpable, is there a chance victims from a future boating accident will be saved? The point is once we as educators take responsibility for student learning outcomes and focus solutions on items within our circle of influence, we can greatly impact results. Inspired by the Preuss’ book, we created a few of our own: Roseto – story centers on the importance of rela...

During a recent school improvement training we asked, “Why is the wild owl population in India decreasing?” After suspending disbelief that this question had anything to do with school improvement, the audience called out possibilities such as: Pollution Migration patterns Loss of habitat They seem plausible, but to pursue them would be folly as none of those would address the cause for the dwindling owl population. Unfortunately too often school improvement teams, in their sense of urgency to “fix” the problem ,  forget to study the problem and possible solutions. They forget that they likely need more data to confirm or deny any of their hypotheses. Time consuming work for sure, but better than the alternative… working on solutions that will have little to no effect on the issue. Victoria Burnhart in her article Multiple Measures indicates that Demographic and Achievement data are insufficient to identify root cause e.g. Number of owls this year compared to...

I recently posted the Five Reasons School Improvement Plans Fail , a cautionary tale featuring the dark side of school improvement. While I think the post offers a good analysis on the common pitfalls of school reform – thanks to DuFour and Eaker, I am not entirely comfortable with the post. It highlighted pitfalls without shaping strategies for avoiding them. The first strategy that came to mind is the 80/20 Rule also known as Pareto’s Principle. The 80/20 Rule - “20 percent of something is always responsible for 80 percent of the results.” Think about how school teams spend their time. How many hours do they spend writing the plan? How many school improvement team meetings do they have after the plan is completed? In my experience teams spend about 80% of their time writing school improvement plans and 20% of their time implementing them. Reframing School Improvement Pareto’s Principle would suggest the inverse. Teams should be focusing 20% of their effort on id...