Episode Details

Operational definitions are clearly defined words, phrases, and concepts that everyone working together agrees to use in the same way. Making assumptions about words like "tardy" or "good" is a fast track to confusion and disengagement. In part 12 of our Deming in Education series, Andrew and David talk about operational definitions in education - for students, faculty, and administrators.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with David P. Langford, who has devoted his life to applying Dr. Deming's philosophy to education, and he offers us his practical advice for implementation. Today's topic is operational definitions for life and learning. David, take it away.

0:00:30.5 David Langford: So, hello Andrew. And so today, I was thinking about the concept that Deming offered to the world could be very profound, and that's why he called it profound knowledge about looking through stuff and deep and it can see... Seem kind of overwhelming, but at the same time, some of the best concepts or ways to think about things are really pretty simple, actually, and amazing, if you adopt just a few principles consistently and really get it in your psychic about how to operate, it can make life so much easier either for your own children or if you're a teacher in school or administrator or whatever, you might be in education... So one of those concepts is the idea of operational definitions. So one of the elements of profound knowledge is systems thinking or appreciation for a system, and so you have a system whether that be a classroom or maybe you're taking your own children on a summer vacation or whatever it might be, that in itself is a system as well. And a lot of the dysfunction that we deal with, especially in schools, actually is coming from the system itself. In fact, Deming talked about that 94% to 98% of the problem can be systemic, right? And the other 1% or 2% is probably special cause variation.

0:02:21.0 DL: So how do we go about making the common cause variation the norm? [chuckle] Now, in schools, what I was taught as a teacher was how to manage dysfunction. Nobody ever taught me how to prevent dysfunction, I sort of had to figure that out over time, that's where you get experience, and... But how do you actually prevent dysfunction, behavior dysfunction, learning dysfunction... Whatever it might be that you've got going on? Well, one of the simplest ways is to take a look at what you could do with operational definitions, so what do we mean by that? Operational definitions, basically just defining, how are we going to operate? So I'll never forget when I was... I think it was about fourth grade, I'd come in early from lunch and I remember I was sitting on the heat register on the side and the bell rang, and I jumped up and ran to my seat, and just as the teacher came in, seeing me run to my seat, and she pulled me out and I got into really super big trouble over that, et cetera, that because I was running in the classroom, okay. So there is a place where you could start to think about operationally defining about where do you want people to be when the bell rings? Something so simple as that, or if you have people late to school in the morning, well, what does that mean? What do you want them to do? Where do you want to be? How can you operationally define it? In the operation of what's going on, how are we gonna define that?

0:04:17.9 DL: I remember when I first started down this pathway and started thinking about things, I asked about 20 different teachers, I said, "What does on time mean to you? Just pick a card and write that down." Well, we got 20 definitions, and some of them were really good, really excellent and well thought out, and I want people in the room, in their seat with their writing utensils