Integrating Total Quality Management (TQM) principles with methods of teaching
Anup Chowdhury | Sunday, 8 June 2008
Education is not only about how to read, write and gather knowledge and speak knowledgeably about a particular subject. If we subscribe to the narrow view as to what the true benefits of education are, we would be ignoring the eighty percent of education's boons that lie submerged. Education not only shapes our behavior but also changes our attitude. Because the most significant change in a person's life is a change of attitude and that alone produces the right actions. Education makes us positive thinkers and a positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible. The attributes of attitude are standard, values, judgments, motives, ethics, beliefs, etc and all these ultimately influence human behavior, the visible characteristics. So, an enlightened human society is possible with quality education.
Formal education and its structure have gone through dramatic changes: face-to-face to online, the course content, nature of learners, and organisational structures. With this the concept of quality has become an intrinsic component of the educational process for its success. Feigenbaum, researcher in quality education, states that 'quality of education' is the key factor in 'invisible' competition between countries since the quality of products and services is determined by the way that "managers, teachers, workers, engineers, and economist think, act and make decisions about quality". Now-a-days, education and in particular higher education itself, is also being driven towards commercial competition imposed by economic forces. Moreover, the globalisation of education, migration of students from one community to other, one country to another, provides adequate causes for concerns to the educationists and administrators. Thus, Total Quality Management (TQM) in Education is a timely tool, which must be clearly understood, adopted and implemented as soon as possible.
The issue of quality in education has been under the public magnifying glass for the last decade. Only recently leaders in education have begun to adopt TQM as an operational philosophy. Many educators resist the application of Total Quality Management principles to education, claiming that not enough parallels can be drawn between business and education to warrant wide spread reforms. Nevertheless, those educational reformers who claim success with TQM maintain that many of its principles are directly applicable to quality in the classroom. They caution, however, that TQM is not necessarily a 'recipe' for success; rather, it provides schools with the tools necessary for organisational restructuring.
Total Quality Management theory has a paradoxical history. W. Edwards Deming, an American, developed this concept after World War II for improving the production quality of goods and services. But the irony is that Americans did not take the concept seriously until the Japanese, who adopted it in 1950s to resurrect their postwar business and industry, used it to dominate world markets by 1980. By then, most U.S. manufactures had finally accepted that the nineteenth-century assembly line factory model was outdated for the modern global economic markets. They ultimately became convinced when their 'bottom lines began to bleed red ink, as customers the world over registered their preference for Japanese goods over American products.
Institutions of higher education have been much slower than businesses to embrace the total quality management philosophy, a number of universities have attempted to implement it in whole or in part. One of the research reported that over 200 institutions of higher learning are involved in total quality management throughout the USA. For example, Columbia University has been working on redesigning the curriculum for its Graduate School of Business for about two years. To determine the needs of its customers, the school sought feedback from company senior executives, recruiters, faculty, alumni and students. The feedback revealed consensus in two areas: first, diversity of approach to business is important; second, five fundamental themes must be addressed in a business curriculum: total quality management, globalisation, ethics, teamwork and interpersonal skills, and management for change. With the support and collaboration of W. Edwards Deming, Columbia created the Deming Center for Quality Management and became actively involved in total quality management.
Edinboro University's business school adapted TQM, and improvements in such areas as class scheduling and hiring have led to savings of close to one million dollars. The University of Pennsylvania has improved its methods of recouping corporate research charges thus reducing its outstanding charges from $18 to $13 million. Other institutions, such as the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina, the University of Tennessee, Drexel University, and Fordham University have added courses which focus specifically on TQM. In Asia, many Japanese and Indian Schools and Universities are adopting and implementing Total Quality Management as a major concern of their formal education.
TQM philosophy in higher education has also been credited with helping to improve morale, reduce costs, improve performance and responsiveness to customers' needs However, concepts as powerful and ubiquitous as those put forward by the quality movement in business, the health industry and now, higher education, tend to evoke skepticism. On the other hand a few researchers argue that a TQM system, which requires a culture committed to well-defined and common goals appear ill suited for higher education. They also believe that misapplication of the TQM techniques and lack of a "total system approach" often accounts for failure.
We can confront the pessimist and support the optimist with a question: why and how does Deming's concept of TQM provide guiding principles for needed educational reform? John Jay Bonstingl, in his article, "The Quality Revolution in Education," has answered this question and outlines the TQM principles he believes are most salient to education reform. He calls them the "Four Pillars of Total Quality Management."
In his first principle he talked about synergistic relationships between schools, teachers and students. In his word - in a classroom, teacher-student teams are the equivalent of industry's front-line workers. The product of their successful teamwork is the development of the student's capabilities, interests, and character. In this case students are the customers and the recipient of educational services for their growth and improvement. The teachers and the schools are suppliers of effective learning tools, environments, and systems. Particularly, the school is responsible for providing long-term educational welfare of students by teaching them how to learn and communicate in high-quality ways, how to access quality in their own work and in that of others, and how to invest in their own lifelong and life-wide learning processes by maximizing opportunities for growth in every aspect of daily life.
The second pillar of his thought is the total dedication to continuous personal and collective improvement. Within a Total Quality school setting, administrators work collaboratively with their customers and teachers. The foundations for this system are fear, intimidation, and an adversarial approach to problem-solving. He said, "today it is in our best interest to encourage everyone's potential by dedicating ourselves to the continual improvement of our own abilities and those of the people with whom we work and live". Bottom line is Total Quality is a win-win approach which works to everyone's ultimate advantage. To support this thought we can refer Demings' conclusion - no human being should ever evaluate another human being and therefore, TQM emphasizes on self-evaluation as being a continuous improvement process. In addition, this principle also laminates to the focusing on students' strengths, individual learning styles, and different types of intelligences.
In the third pillar of TQM, J. J. Bonstingl has tried to interlink operational philosophy in academics, recognising the institution as a system and the work done within it as an ongoing process. The primary implication of this principle is that individual students and teachers are less interested in blaming for failure than the system in which they work. In this point quality speaks to working on the system, which must be examined to identify and eliminate the flawed processes that are responsible for allowing its participants to fail. Since systems are made up of processes, the improvements made in the quality of those processes largely determine the quality of the resulting product. In the new paradigm of learning, continual improvement of learning processes based on learning outcomes replaces the outdated "teach and test" mode.
The fourth and most important TQM principle applied to education is leadership. It necessitates that the success of TQM in any educational institute is the responsibility of top management. The school teachers must establish the context in which students can best achieve their potential through the continuous improvement and this will be the output of a good cooperation between teachers and students. Teachers who emphasize on content area literacy and principle-centered teaching should provide the leadership, framework, and tools which are necessary for incessant improvement in the learning process.
To sum up the core benefits of fundamental principles with a link to practical evidences, J. J. Bonstingl outlines following clauses which could be applied in educational institutions :
l Redefine the role, purpose and responsibilities
l Improve schools as a "way of life"
l Plan comprehensive leadership training for educators at all levels
l Create staff development program that addresses the attitudes and beliefs of the institution.
l Use research and practice-based information to guide both policy and practice
l Design comprehensive child-development initiatives that cut across a variety of agencies and institutions
Bangladesh is seriously running short of quality education and becoming last in the race of globalization and glocalizaiton. Because the term quality is not only cramped within the business, specifically, manufacturing system but also pertinent to those who are behind it. A quality worker can produce quality product, a quality leader can see the invisible and quality teamwork can achieve impossible. So in this generation of outsourcing and manpower exporting, educational institution of Bangladesh, particularly higher education providers, have to play a momentous role by integrating TQM in their method of teaching and hope this will give us a lead in the race.
However, it is noteworthy to remember that in addition to patience, participatory management among well-trained and educated partners is crucial to the success of TQM in education; everyone involved must understand and believe in principles. Some personnel who are committed to the principles can facilitate the success of institution with TQM. Their vision and skills in leadership, management, interpersonal communication, problem solving and creative cooperation are important qualities for successful implementation of TQM.
Now it is up to the schools and universities of Bangladesh, where they want to position themselves in this world of quality?
The writer is lecturer, BRAC Business School. While writing this piece he has taken help of different research articles. Write to anup@bracuniversity.ac.bd
Formal education and its structure have gone through dramatic changes: face-to-face to online, the course content, nature of learners, and organisational structures. With this the concept of quality has become an intrinsic component of the educational process for its success. Feigenbaum, researcher in quality education, states that 'quality of education' is the key factor in 'invisible' competition between countries since the quality of products and services is determined by the way that "managers, teachers, workers, engineers, and economist think, act and make decisions about quality". Now-a-days, education and in particular higher education itself, is also being driven towards commercial competition imposed by economic forces. Moreover, the globalisation of education, migration of students from one community to other, one country to another, provides adequate causes for concerns to the educationists and administrators. Thus, Total Quality Management (TQM) in Education is a timely tool, which must be clearly understood, adopted and implemented as soon as possible.
The issue of quality in education has been under the public magnifying glass for the last decade. Only recently leaders in education have begun to adopt TQM as an operational philosophy. Many educators resist the application of Total Quality Management principles to education, claiming that not enough parallels can be drawn between business and education to warrant wide spread reforms. Nevertheless, those educational reformers who claim success with TQM maintain that many of its principles are directly applicable to quality in the classroom. They caution, however, that TQM is not necessarily a 'recipe' for success; rather, it provides schools with the tools necessary for organisational restructuring.
Total Quality Management theory has a paradoxical history. W. Edwards Deming, an American, developed this concept after World War II for improving the production quality of goods and services. But the irony is that Americans did not take the concept seriously until the Japanese, who adopted it in 1950s to resurrect their postwar business and industry, used it to dominate world markets by 1980. By then, most U.S. manufactures had finally accepted that the nineteenth-century assembly line factory model was outdated for the modern global economic markets. They ultimately became convinced when their 'bottom lines began to bleed red ink, as customers the world over registered their preference for Japanese goods over American products.
Institutions of higher education have been much slower than businesses to embrace the total quality management philosophy, a number of universities have attempted to implement it in whole or in part. One of the research reported that over 200 institutions of higher learning are involved in total quality management throughout the USA. For example, Columbia University has been working on redesigning the curriculum for its Graduate School of Business for about two years. To determine the needs of its customers, the school sought feedback from company senior executives, recruiters, faculty, alumni and students. The feedback revealed consensus in two areas: first, diversity of approach to business is important; second, five fundamental themes must be addressed in a business curriculum: total quality management, globalisation, ethics, teamwork and interpersonal skills, and management for change. With the support and collaboration of W. Edwards Deming, Columbia created the Deming Center for Quality Management and became actively involved in total quality management.
Edinboro University's business school adapted TQM, and improvements in such areas as class scheduling and hiring have led to savings of close to one million dollars. The University of Pennsylvania has improved its methods of recouping corporate research charges thus reducing its outstanding charges from $18 to $13 million. Other institutions, such as the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina, the University of Tennessee, Drexel University, and Fordham University have added courses which focus specifically on TQM. In Asia, many Japanese and Indian Schools and Universities are adopting and implementing Total Quality Management as a major concern of their formal education.
TQM philosophy in higher education has also been credited with helping to improve morale, reduce costs, improve performance and responsiveness to customers' needs However, concepts as powerful and ubiquitous as those put forward by the quality movement in business, the health industry and now, higher education, tend to evoke skepticism. On the other hand a few researchers argue that a TQM system, which requires a culture committed to well-defined and common goals appear ill suited for higher education. They also believe that misapplication of the TQM techniques and lack of a "total system approach" often accounts for failure.
We can confront the pessimist and support the optimist with a question: why and how does Deming's concept of TQM provide guiding principles for needed educational reform? John Jay Bonstingl, in his article, "The Quality Revolution in Education," has answered this question and outlines the TQM principles he believes are most salient to education reform. He calls them the "Four Pillars of Total Quality Management."
In his first principle he talked about synergistic relationships between schools, teachers and students. In his word - in a classroom, teacher-student teams are the equivalent of industry's front-line workers. The product of their successful teamwork is the development of the student's capabilities, interests, and character. In this case students are the customers and the recipient of educational services for their growth and improvement. The teachers and the schools are suppliers of effective learning tools, environments, and systems. Particularly, the school is responsible for providing long-term educational welfare of students by teaching them how to learn and communicate in high-quality ways, how to access quality in their own work and in that of others, and how to invest in their own lifelong and life-wide learning processes by maximizing opportunities for growth in every aspect of daily life.
The second pillar of his thought is the total dedication to continuous personal and collective improvement. Within a Total Quality school setting, administrators work collaboratively with their customers and teachers. The foundations for this system are fear, intimidation, and an adversarial approach to problem-solving. He said, "today it is in our best interest to encourage everyone's potential by dedicating ourselves to the continual improvement of our own abilities and those of the people with whom we work and live". Bottom line is Total Quality is a win-win approach which works to everyone's ultimate advantage. To support this thought we can refer Demings' conclusion - no human being should ever evaluate another human being and therefore, TQM emphasizes on self-evaluation as being a continuous improvement process. In addition, this principle also laminates to the focusing on students' strengths, individual learning styles, and different types of intelligences.
In the third pillar of TQM, J. J. Bonstingl has tried to interlink operational philosophy in academics, recognising the institution as a system and the work done within it as an ongoing process. The primary implication of this principle is that individual students and teachers are less interested in blaming for failure than the system in which they work. In this point quality speaks to working on the system, which must be examined to identify and eliminate the flawed processes that are responsible for allowing its participants to fail. Since systems are made up of processes, the improvements made in the quality of those processes largely determine the quality of the resulting product. In the new paradigm of learning, continual improvement of learning processes based on learning outcomes replaces the outdated "teach and test" mode.
The fourth and most important TQM principle applied to education is leadership. It necessitates that the success of TQM in any educational institute is the responsibility of top management. The school teachers must establish the context in which students can best achieve their potential through the continuous improvement and this will be the output of a good cooperation between teachers and students. Teachers who emphasize on content area literacy and principle-centered teaching should provide the leadership, framework, and tools which are necessary for incessant improvement in the learning process.
To sum up the core benefits of fundamental principles with a link to practical evidences, J. J. Bonstingl outlines following clauses which could be applied in educational institutions :
l Redefine the role, purpose and responsibilities
l Improve schools as a "way of life"
l Plan comprehensive leadership training for educators at all levels
l Create staff development program that addresses the attitudes and beliefs of the institution.
l Use research and practice-based information to guide both policy and practice
l Design comprehensive child-development initiatives that cut across a variety of agencies and institutions
Bangladesh is seriously running short of quality education and becoming last in the race of globalization and glocalizaiton. Because the term quality is not only cramped within the business, specifically, manufacturing system but also pertinent to those who are behind it. A quality worker can produce quality product, a quality leader can see the invisible and quality teamwork can achieve impossible. So in this generation of outsourcing and manpower exporting, educational institution of Bangladesh, particularly higher education providers, have to play a momentous role by integrating TQM in their method of teaching and hope this will give us a lead in the race.
However, it is noteworthy to remember that in addition to patience, participatory management among well-trained and educated partners is crucial to the success of TQM in education; everyone involved must understand and believe in principles. Some personnel who are committed to the principles can facilitate the success of institution with TQM. Their vision and skills in leadership, management, interpersonal communication, problem solving and creative cooperation are important qualities for successful implementation of TQM.
Now it is up to the schools and universities of Bangladesh, where they want to position themselves in this world of quality?
The writer is lecturer, BRAC Business School. While writing this piece he has taken help of different research articles. Write to anup@bracuniversity.ac.bd