KM in Education

Who Knows What - Who's Accountable?

One challenge that should be addressed in the next few years is helping educators, administrators and those who support them to quickly tap sources of expertise. Currently most people leverage their professional networks to locate the person or information they want. With the number of reform efforts, foundations, for example, express frustration at not knowing who is currently funding or planning to fund specific areas, so they can best determine their grantmaking strategies. At the district or charter management organization level, schools that are successful in certain areas should share their experience and strategies so other similar schools do not reinvent the wheel.

If all these entities belonged to one large corporation, say USAEducation, in the interest of minimizing redundancy and therefore costs, USAEducation executives would mandate building of processes and tools to ensure that expertise is shared throughout the corporation, not recreated for every similar issue that pops up per school, district, state, or foundation.

Unfortunately, our education system is not designed in such a way so that some entity, even the U.S. Department of Education, feels accountable for being cost-effective across the sector. Perhaps transformational change across the education sector will occur when an organization finally assumes that level of responsibility.

Ending insularity to achieve high performance

The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, also known as BASRC, is currently working on a best practices study drawn from high-performing classrooms, schools and districts. According to Ida Oberman, BASRC's Director of Research and Evaluation, among the study's findings is a pattern of high performance facilitated through knowledge accessed from the outside. High performers tend to tap into external knowledge sources.

This pattern should not be surprising. The first chapter of Bill Ouchi's Making Schools Work touches on this pattern in the transformation of one of the worst-performing elementary schools in Chicago into a high-performing school. In the process, teachers at the school conducted research and imported a reading program from New Zealand to help children who are in danger of falling behind. Their willingness and readiness to adopt best practices from outside certainly contributed to their success.

By encouraging and helping more schools and districts to look beyond themselves and their communities in order to identify best practices for their students, we should be able to improve student achievement without reinventing the wheel.

Teacher feedback - using our heads or our feet?

I reconnected this past weekend with some of my former classmates from INSEAD at Pomelo in San Francisco. After chatting with them about shared friends and experiences, I remembered how my INSEAD experience also included the first time I had seen students voting with their feet.

I imagine a professor's worst nightmare must include showing up for a lecture prepared and finding only a handful of students willing to return to their course. I was one of three students sitting in that empty amphi while the beleaguered visiting professor bravely smiled and continued his lecture as if we were a full class of 70.

This experience exemplifies the lack of appropriate constructive feedback mechanisms in the education system. In order for graduate students to feel that their only point of recourse is to boycott the lecture hall, effective feedback processes clearly fall short. In higher education, course evaluation surveys mid-way and at the end of a course allow students to rate professors and provide constructive feedback. Such feedback is of limited use given its extended timeline and general nature. Furthermore, a clever professor could easily manipulate the system with strategic use of testing and grading. Feedback is also often collected from observations by other professors or teaching assistants. K-12 education offers even fewer feedback channels.

Although my classmates successfully achieved their objectives by boycotting the classroom, it is certainly an extreme feedback strategy that I would not wish on any teacher. Teachers can often learn as much, if not more, than students in their classroms, and higher education, as well as K-12 schools, should view effective feedback mechanisms as a very real opportunity for improving teacher quality. One promising avenue to watch is handhelds in classrooms, for example, in a Texas school district, where teachers and administrators can more easily identify strengths and weaknesses in teaching strategies, and in university lecture halls, where professors can instantly assess student comprehension and receive student questions via the Next Generation Mobile Classroom project. These innovations would not have helped my disgruntled classmates, but I remain optimistic that, in the near future, we will see more opportunities for students, parents and the community-at-large to provide direct feedback on the quality of teaching.

Student-focused processes

As a former process consultant, I have sometimes been overwhelmed by the number of process improvement opportunities I have observed while visiting a school or speaking with an educator. One opportunity that frequently strikes me is building processes around students.

I like to think of students as the ultimate customer for educators. A customer focus has long been a critical component to successful business processes. Yet despite the focus on student outcomes, educational institutions seem to tailor few of their processes around students.

If public education had focused on students, the process of creating a student record would have long ago incorporated the longitudinal history of a student as s/he developed academically, emotionally and personally across grades, schools, districts, and even states. A holistic student focus would have also gathered knowledge from all facets of a student's life, from home, extracurriculars, and academic enrichment activities, to build a complete picture of a student's situation. Armed with this knowledge, a teacher would be better prepared to design lesson plans to address students' specific strengths and weaknesses, to be sensitive to extraordinary family situations, and to suggest appropriate enrichment activities not tried before.

Student-focused processes also have tremendous potential at the aggregate level. Just as customer surveys provide valuable input, student feedback could help schools improve their inquiry processes toward continuous improvement. Student performance could also serve as input into curriculum design.

In summary, most school processes still acknowledge a gap in fully addressing student needs. Schools are closing that gap by slowly incorporating more knowledge from and about students at both the individual and aggregate level. It is in this transition that schools are discovering technology as an enabler for coordinating knowledge.

Coordinating student knowledge

Amazon's website demonstrates the brilliant marketing that has evolved due to increasingly sophisticated coordination of vast amounts of customer knowledge. Its ability to correctly identify new products or books that a customer might like to purchase exemplifies the private sector's capacity for effectively targeting customers by capturing and integrating customer knowledge into comprehensive customer profiles.

Education is headed in the same direction, toward integrating knowledge about each student, but is still far from using the knowledge to effectively help student achievement. From a technology standpoint, integration of different student information sources has only been enhanced in the past few years by the adoption of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) that enables K-12 software applications to share data. From a process standpoint, however, schools are still far from fully integrating different knowledge sources to create a complete student profile. For example, what one teacher has learned about a particular student over one year is rarely passed on to the student's teacher in the following year.

Pulling together all the knowledge about a student entails not only collecting all the student's performance data in the form of assessment scores, grades, and attendance, but also capturing all the observations and learnings from each adult relationship, whether it is a teacher, guidance counselor, parent, or afterschool tutor. Only then, will school staff, armed with the full context of an individual student's situation, be able to make effective decisions for improving an individual student's achievement.

My next postings will address in more depth how coordination is evolving at both a technological and process level.

Collaborative Potential

Despite the common goal of improving student achievement, education organizations are often split over the best approach to improving public education. This divergence masks the reality of the situation, that regardless of the school and the approach it embraces, each school has enrolled students for the purpose of learning.

If everyone is truly working in the interest of students, once students are enrolled in schools, it would seem that mutual collaboration across different camps might highlight and enable cooperation in addressing similar challenges. An organization such as the Charter Schools Development Center which provides technical support to charter schools may differ in philosophy from the Coalition of Essential Schools, which emphasizes the development and sustainability of equitable, intellectually vibrant, personalized schools. Yet they both highly value the dissemination of knowledge to their schools and probably face similar challenges in keeping information fresh, relevant, and protected from copying. Given the dearth of resources to devote to knowledge dissemination, working together to address such issues may result in stronger processes and tools for both organizations, and ultimately better practices toward the education of each student.

Cross-Pollination Revisited

Schools could benefit immensely from tapping into not only knowledge resources of other schools, but also those of the community. Through the dedication of committed school administrators or parents, some exceptional public schools have succeeded in identifying and using the full extent of community resources available. Organizations such as DonorsChoose and Adopt-a-Classroom have also established effective ways for classrooms to access communities, but for financial resources.

One article on education philanthropy calculated, that 30 million parents volunteer time at schools that is the equivalent of 3.4 million 40-hour work weeks annually. Imagine how many non-parent community members are willing to donate time and expertise to help schools. It is a huge untapped resource. For example, a local accountant could help a school with its finances, a neighborhood painter could help repaint the school facilities, or retired seniors could help tutor students. Rather than procuring more funding, effectively linking into the community's knowledge and expertise could do more to help schools alleviate budget crunches, build a supportive school community, and ultimately improve student performance.

Networks as a Performance Predictor?

At the Summer KM Cluster event in San Francisco, I came across the application of social network analysis to the education field. Whereas it originally was used to help organizations understand their employees' interrelationships and serve as a predictor of organizational performance, researchers have taken it to the next level. Analysis of an employee's network can help predict individual performance.

The natural next step among researchers was to analyze students' networks as an approach to predict student performance. However, I am more intrigued by the idea of using social network analysis as a predictor of school performance. It would be fascinating to see how the interrelationships among school administrators, teachers, parents, community members, and students could affect the overall performance of a school. I have yet to locate specific research in this area, but I am sure I cannot be the first one to have thought of this.

Cross-Pollination

While I spoke today with Julie Schoknecht, formerly of New Sector Alliance, we were struck by our reverse career paths. As I, an ex-consultant, venture into the non-profit world, she is leaving it to go into corporate consulting.

It is due in part to the lack of people who make these transitions that organizations such as New Sector Alliance emerged to create innovative partnerships to bridge the gap among the business, academic, and non-profit worlds. Its founder and president, Carly Janson, recognized the high-impact potential for sharing resources across these traditionally divided sectors. By bringing the skills and knowledge of business professionals and students to non-profit enterprises, New Sector helps maximize social impact, as well as develop leadership experience in the social sector.

New Sector highlights the potential for sharing knowledge and experience across sectors. They have worked with some education organizations, including KIPP, Citizen Schools, and Breakthrough Collaborative. But that is only the tip of the iceberg in the education world.

K-12 education has the potential to benefit immensely from this form of cross-pollination. I am continually in search of partners and ideas to help accelerate this trend. Please e-mail me if you think you can contribute to my search.

A Permanent Home

After a brief flirtation with Blogger, I decided to move my blog to Typepad. Typepad's usability trumped Blogger's tempting combination of free service and long-term potential.

Fortunately, I had only accumulated a week's worth of postings, which I will gradually rework into my blog's new home.

Since my last posting, I spoke with Lisa Petrides, the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, about the possibility of organizing a group of KM practitioners in the education industry. KM professional communities such as KM Cluster and KMPro already exist, primarily for business applications. A forum that addresses KM issues specific to K-12 education would be a great opportunity for sharing and collaboration. Also, in an industry with a poor reputation for sharing knowledge and innovation, KM practitioners present a natural starting point for generating a stronger collaborative culture within K-12 education.