{"id":464,"date":"2009-07-06T06:57:15","date_gmt":"2009-07-06T14:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/?p=464"},"modified":"2009-07-08T22:54:47","modified_gmt":"2009-07-09T02:54:47","slug":"sharing-the-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sabusense.com\/?p=464","title":{"rendered":"Sharing the Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drilling beneath the 5th Why?<\/strong>
\n\"dna\"<\/a>
\n…and finding a tangled surprise<\/strong><\/p>\n

When things don\u2019t work out the way we expect them to, a natural response is to ask WHY?<\/em> Answers that seem to make sense then usually determine what we decide to do about it.<\/p>\n

But today there seems to be a fundamental problem with the commonsense answers offered for why American schools need to be fixed. Among the most popular seem to be: There are no \u201cstandards.\u201d Teachers aren\u2019t well-prepared. Educators don\u2019t want to change. Administrators are too controlling. There isn\u2019t enough research about \u201cWhat Works,\u201d There isn\u2019t enough time in the school day\/year. Classes are too large. Unions don\u2019t care about the kids,\u201d etc.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet after decades of concerted foundation and government actions aimed at fixing these logical “causes” for why effective learning and teaching was not happening in every<\/strong> classroom\u2026 nothing is significantly different. What can be proven to work for some<\/em>, apparently can\u2019t be supported and sustained for all<\/em>. WHY?<\/em> How can that be? Educators, corporate, foundation and government executives aren\u2019t dumb. They\u2019re probably more familiar with schools than any other organization in society because, like most of us, their understanding is based on personal experiences as its veterans and\/or victims.<\/p>\n

Asking Why?<\/strong>
\nOne of this site\u2019s premises is that the way we ask a question affects the answers. Therefore, to take the focus off initially-assumed answers, we’ve often turned to Japanese management’s 5 Why?<\/em> questioning approach to problem-solving. Its intriguing promise was that it could lead us through tangled layers of a problem\u2019s \u201ceffects\u201d to its actual \u201croot cause.\u201d Then, with a better sense of the connections between a problem\u2019s visible \u201csymptoms\u201d and the \u201cdisease\u201d itself, we might better understand why attempts to scale up solutions to \u201csymptoms\u201d in the end fail to cure the core systemic problem.<\/p>\n

The 5 Why?<\/em> process, in effect, backmaps cause & effect<\/em> thinking.<\/p>\n