Education Quality Improvement - Role of Teachers

 [14/02, 22:47] Rao Narayana: can have a role to play in quality

assurance.

Total quality management incorporates quality assurance, and

extends and develops it. TQM is about creating a quality culture where

the aim of every member of staff is to delight their customers, and

where the structure of their organization allows them to do so. In TQM

the customer is sovereign.

[14/02, 22:51] Rao Narayana: TQM is about providing the customer with what they want, when

they want it and how they want it. It involves moving with changing

customer expectations and fashions to design products and services that

meet and exceed their expectations. Only by delighting customers will

they return and tell their friends about it (this is sometimes called the

sell-on definition of quality). The perceptions and expectations of

customers are recognized as being short term and fickle, and so

organizations have to find ways of keeping close to their customers to

be able to respond to their changing tastes wants.

[15/02, 07:43] Rao Narayana: .

Barriers to quality are not the sole prerogative of managers. Many

staff fear the consequences of empowerment, especially if things go

wrong. They are often comfortable with sameness. They need to have

the benefits demonstrated to them.

[15/02, 15:15] Rao Narayana: Learners learn best in a style suited to their needs and inclinations.

An educational institution that takes the total quality route must take

seriously the issue of learning styles and needs to have strategies for

individualization and differentiation in learning. The learner is the

primary customer, and unless learning styles meet individual needs it

will not be possible for that institution to claim that it has achieved total

quality.

[16/02, 08:58] Rao Narayana: Juran developed a road map to quality planning, which consists of the

following steps:

1. Identify who are the customers.

2. Determine the needs of those customers.

3. Translate those needs into our language. 

4. Develop a product that can respond to those needs.

5. Optimize the product features so as to meet our needs as well as

customer needs.

6. Develop a process that is able to produce the product.

7. Optimize the process.

8. Prove that the process can produce the product under operating

conditions.

9. Transfer the process to operations.

[16/02, 19:36] Rao Narayana: Communities of knowledge

It is important to understand that knowledge is often built up and

generated by informal, self-organizing networks of practitioners. These

ad hoc groups are known as communities of practice or knowledge

communities. They are groups of like-minded people who have met to

share experience. They have many similarities with quality teams and

quality circles.

They differ from work teams in that they are not formal or task￾orientated teams. Instead they are self-organized networks, whose

organization is one that makes sense to its members. They are often

brought together by common interests and find their common purpose to

be the need to share expertise and solve problems. They develop in the

social space between formal hierarchies and project teams. They are

created out of a need to share and communicate ideas.

The idea of knowledge community networks is one that has a strong

resonance for education. Teachers and lecturers, after all, have a strong

sense of their own worth and a strong sense of professionalism. They

relate well to colleagues and use their peers as sounding boards for

ideas. It may be that the knowledge community is the model for

productive knowledge sharing in education.