[The following article appears in the October 1994 edition of _TQM_in_Higher_Education_, pages 1-3.] NEW IDEAS COME MORE EASILY TO THOSE ACCUSTOMED TO CHANGE Ed. note: Myron Tribus, an internationally-known quality counselor, spends much of his time working with school districts, colleges, and universities. Tribus received his doctorate from UCLA where he also became a full professor. In 1969, Tribus was appointed assistant secretary of commerce for science and technology, leaving to become a senior vice president at Xerox Corp. In 1974, he directed MIT's center for advanced engineering study where he and Deming became friends. TQM/HE: Thank you for sharing your perceptions of the quality movement in education. What have you been doing to promote TQM? Tribus: Well unfortunately, I've been spending a good deal of time on my own company, which is introducing a new type of power plant that will result in huge fuel savings. The rest of the time I spend helping schools and communities with their quality councils. TQM/HE: Why is higher education so slow to adopt quality management? Tribus: New ideas come more easily to people who are habituated to change. If you have a society that believes in continuous quality improvement, it's easier to introduce new ideas. I think it has to do with the fact the Japanese are moving faster in adopting new ideas--not inventing new ones, but adopting them. I think that's related to the fact that their people are so accustomed to continuous improvement, they no longer fear that if something different is done, they won't be caught and exposed for being inadequate. TQM/HE: Do you think this is also happening in educational systems? Tribus: Yes, I do, particularly with those who've been teaching for 10-15 years. They have the awful feeling that they "can't do that." So, they find all kind of reasons to not do it. A Quality Classroom TQM/HE: What do you mean by "that" and "it"? Tribus: Let me give you a specific example. A few years ago, I gave a talk on what I felt a quality classroom should be like. I take the view that if you're not practicing quality management in the classroom, you should quit saying that you're doing quality management in your school. If you're just improving the system to fix the copy machine or something, you're not doing anything-- it's got to be in the classroom. After I described a quality classroom to a group of teachers, one came up to me and said, "Dr. Tribus, I don't think I can do what you're talking about. I've been teaching for 23 years, and every time I get a new class, I close the door and turn to the class and tell them to remember that in this classroom I'm God." She said, "I don't think I can change." The notion that she might have a different relationship with the class if she adopted quality principles was just very frightening to her. She built her security around that belief system. TQM/HE: What about the other extreme--what's new and exciting about using TQM in the classroom? Tribus: At the other extreme, and the most exciting thing I've gotten into is my discovery of the work of Ruven Feuerstein. Feuerstein's spent a lifetime working with the learning disabled in Israel. His earliest works were with the children of the Holocaust--those that were essentially destroyed by surviving three or four years in the concentration camps. When they were brought to Israel and were given IQ tests, they scored 40 or below. Feuerstein worked with these youngsters and developed techniques to study their learning difficulties. He made miraculous changes in them--some have gone on to become business managers and doctors. He's even made remarkable changes in kids with spina bifida and Down's syndrome. And he's worked with children in Ethiopia. In Tauntom [sic. probably Taunton], MA, about 30 miles out of Boston, an entire school district is running their kids through his program. They've moved from running the program for only the learning disabled to those that are "ordinary," but who weren't doing well in school. One of the areas I'm hoping to research is how can his techniques make kids that are already very good, better. Without a lot of diagrams I can't explain what he's doing because the paradigm shift is very big. Learning How to Learn TQM/HE: Before you get into his methods, please explain why you think his ideas are so important. Tribus: When I study "education" as a system and follow up on Deming's ideas, what I recognize is that in the middle of the system is a process that gives it all "meaning." Everything else is supportive. In education, the process that gives it all meaning is "learning." Teaching is supportive of learning. Learning is the process. What Feuerstein's done was to intensively study the process of learning how to learn. Nobody in school tells you that the reason you are there is to learn how to learn. Who do you know who says: "Here is how you teach people to 'learn how to learn?'" What we do is to teach and hope the kids will learn. For those that aren't learning very well, we try to figure out what to do. But what about a systematic way of tackling the reason why kids haven't learned how to learn? What Feuerstein has done was to analyze this in detail. Imagine that on the left side of a page there's a big "s," which stands for either "stimulus" or "signal" or whatever it is that starts you out. In the middle of the page, we'll put a box with a big "l" which stands for the "learner." And on the right side of the page we will draw a big "r" which stands for "response." (See Figure 1.) ____________________________________________________________ FIGURE 1 Stimulus ======> Leaner ======> Response _____________________________________________________________ Human Intervention Necessary for Learning Most people still think of Pavlov and the "stimulus"-"response"-"reward" cycle. In fact, B.F. Skinner's philosophy isn't too far from that. We know that it certainly doesn't work for humans. We know that humans receive a stimulus and then decide what type of response to make. When Feuerstein examined this cycle, he concluded that if you want people to learn what the human race has already learned, it's necessary for another human to intervene. He calls this the "mediated" learning experience. TQM/HE: What does the "mediator" do? Tribus: The mediator intervenes at three stages. In the first stage of "signal" or "stimulus," the mediator helps the person deal with the stimulus and with the question of what it means and how to see it in context. There are eight or nine common problems here. One of them is illustrated by a little nine-year old girl. I asked her, "What are you getting out of all of this studying?" She replied, "The first thing is that I've learned to control my impulsivity." Feuerstein puts the impulse to just do something at the top of the list. He also says that sometimes people have an episodic view of the world. Nothing is connected to anything else. When a stimulus comes, they never see it in a context, because context never mattered. This has a bad effect on people who want to "learn to learn" because they don't know how to respond to signals. Of the common problems, Feuerstein has developed techniques to help people bridge what they learn to problems they might be experiencing at home. In the second phase, the mediator helps you elaborate upon the information or process it; while in the third phase, s/he helps you to see what's in the "response" stage to help you go where you want to go. Ulterior Motives TQM/HE: How about the relationship between the person who is mediating and the person who is learning? Tribus: First, you have to examine such things as the mediator's intentions. Here we run into a lot of problems with teachers, especially when we begin to ask such questions as "Why are you teaching?" You'll find that a certain fraction of teachers are there on an ego trip, or for a need to control. So if the teachers don't understand the mediation function of learning, the teacher will assume that it's irrelevant since many have the "It doesn't matter what I think, these kids are here to learn" mentality. I'm afraid that I've done no justice to Feuerstein, since it's impossible to compress this paradigm shift into just a few words. But once you understand what he's saying, you begin to see all kinds of areas where you can apply what he said. There's a book that just came out, Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment: A Collection. It's a series of articles, including some by Feuerstein himself, talking about working with low performers. The book gives some history of how these ideas came into being and the results of empirical studies. It also discusses the impact on creativity. I think now, if you want to understand the "quality" of anything, especially in education, you have to read Deming, Covey, and Feuerstein. Deming helps you see the system, the problems of variation, and the common errors we make when we don't understand how the system impacts the individual. Covey helps us understand ourselves, the importance of the old virtues, and some of the troubles you get into when you don't. Feuerstein gets right down to the nub of the matter--namely, learning is the central thing. When you're put into a learning situation, if you don't know how to learn, you don't know how to respond. As a result, nobody knows what to do with you. TQM/HE: Let's agree that you can't expect an individual to do anything for which he/she hasn't been trained to do. So teachers who've graduated from our schools of education can't be expected to know how to "mediate." Are we producing "defective products?" Tribus: What we have to reckon with is that before Feuerstein came along, we didn't know. And you can't blame people for navigating on what they thought was a flat earth. In the schools of education, they don't know and you can't expect anything else. Now, since Feuerstein's work is only recently available, and it's just been documented that his work can do what he claims it will, they'll eventually know. So now we have to be involved in a paradigm shift for teacher education. Furthermore, we've got to get to the teachers who are already out in the field and do something about them. TQM/HE: What have you learned from Feuerstein's work? Tribus: One of the things that I've learned is that if you hand this off to people who don't have the correct instruction and training, they'll probably mess it up. It's similar to what happened with the quality movement when everyone adopted quality circles without understanding them and they didn't work. As a result, the quality movement got a bad name. It means we have to set up an appropriate infrastructure, and we have to train enough people so they can design these systems and put them in place. In order for that to happen, we need money. For example, right now I'm working with the San Francisco Unified School District. Now, how do I get them to set aside money from a terribly depressed budget to teach teachers who won't be ready until a year from now? Training Teachers TQM/HE: How are you going to approach the problem of training teachers? Tribus: I'm not going to try to do some grand, large-scale thing. I'm just going to find some people who want to do this, and then help them until we accumulate enough evidence and enough experience doing it. That's what David Langford did. He just set out and did it. I've recently discovered that there are a number of individuals who've read Feuerstein, and who are beginning to do things. I'm also hoping to learn how to use the Internet to link people together so that we can talk, find out what we're doing, and then build. I think that the next wave we'll ride is Feuerstein's. I don't know of anyone else that's contributing with experimental data and a theory. Deming said that you don't learn anything without a theory. Here we have a theory, we have data, and we have different experiments going on how to help people understand how to learn to learn. TQM/HE: The theory, the data, and the experiments are at all levels of education? Tribus: To me that's the most fascinating thing. His work is with children with disabilities. He has a beautiful book called Don't Accept Me As I Am: Teaching the Disabled to Excel. In it, he makes the point that the so-called disabled kids are put into an environment that they can survive in, rather than changing them so that they can survive in the real world. Feuerstein also has a lot of things to say about IQ tests. He believes that the only purpose of an examination is to help the teacher and learner together decide what to do next. Never use a test to see how well a person has done--rather, use tests to see what you want to do next. Toward a Common Goal The most important characteristic of the mediator and learner is that they are to work together on a common objective, which in this case is for the learner to learn. You have to set the stage for this to occur. It's not a mediator-controller situation. In fact, the entire element of who's in charge and who's in control is very important. When you put kids in charge of their own destiny, while you mediate and help them connect with what they want--what they should want--the entire relationship changes. Those who've gotten their sense of power by controlling other people, or controlling a room full of kids, will never understand this. But when you do it right, the kids are busy working, rather quiet, and they're much better than you ever would think. TQM/HE: How would this affect the administration of the institution? Tribus: I don't know for sure. In Tauntom, we'll see for the first time what happens when an entire district implements Feuerstein's methods. Myron Tribus can be reached at 350 Britto Terrace, Fremont, CA 94539; Ph: 510/651-3641; Fax: 510/656-9875. Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment: A Collection, edited by Meir Ben-Hur, is available from: IRI/Skylight Publishing, Inc., 200 E. Wood St., Suite 274, Palatine, IL 60067; Ph: 800/348-4474; Fax: 708/991-6420. [For for information or to subscribe to TQMHE, contact: TQM in Higher Education Magna Publications, Inc. 2718 Dryden Drive Madison, Wisconsin 53704-3086 Phone: 608-246-3591 or 800-433-0499.]