Part 3 in a series of posts on Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities
In a previous post “The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community” I shared it is the ability to embrace a duality in their thinking that builds an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. To hold two opposing ideas in their minds and reach a creative solution creates an ambidextrous PLC, making them more flexible, innovative, and effective. It is ability and, more importantly, it is an attitude.
Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community's thinking can have...
Internal and External Focus
Bias Towards Thinking and Bias Toward Action
Put Teachers First and Put Students First
Focus on Teaching and Focus on Learning
Focus on All Students and Focus on Individual Students
Kaizen and Tenakaizen
High Levels of Teamwork and High Levels of Personal Accountability
We Have the Answers and They Have the Answers
Data Driven and Skeptical of Data
Predictable and Change is Normal
Today I will focus on Kaizen and Tenakaizen
There is a commercial about Tiger Woods that say, “relentless consistency, 50 percent; willingness to change, 50%.” The commercial from the global management consulting firm Accenture sums up perfectly the dual focus of the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community; relentless consistency while at the same time continuously innovating.
Professional Learning Communities must have a strong unwavering and unyielding commitment to use best practices, research based methods, proven strategies, and all practices that are known to make a difference for student learning. Professional Learning Communities must practice “kaizen”, the continual improvement in their work. A strong Professional Learning Community is always seeking to gain a greater depth of understanding of their work and continual implementation of those best practices. Their internal focus is to find those critical aspects of their work and apply the best-known methods without exception.
PLCs must continue to ask what students need to know, what is the best way for students to demonstrate what they know, use student data in the form of formative and summative common assessments, and re-teaching for those students who have not shown mastery, or provide enrichment for those who have.
The other duality of the Professional Learning Community function is to continually innovate. If “kaizen” is getting better at what they do, the term “tenakaizen” is to make something completely different, to innovate. Author of the book Think Better, Tim Hurson who coined the term tenakaizen explains that, “Tenakaizen is a composite word deriving from ten, meaning ‘law’ or ‘tradition,’ kai, meaning ‘change,’ and zen, meaning ‘good.’” According to Tim we can interpret the word as meaning, “good revolution” because, “Rather than reproducing the old, it produces the new.” The Professional Learning Community should be continuously learning to do new things in new ways. The only way to even greater results is to find new innovative ideas.
The “opposable mind” allows a member of a Professional Learning Community to have the, "…predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”
In other words, ambidextrous PLCs have a focus on getting better at what you do, while looking for new ways to do it.Professional Learning Communities that can cope with this duality and manage this con-current focus will prove themselves to be... ambidextrous.
Michael Fullan describes it this way: the “learning is the work.” Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities focus on, “their core goals and tasks with relentless consistency, while at the same time learning continuously how to get better and better a what they are doing.”
“The secret behind ‘learning is the work’ lies in our integration of the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we already know) and the new learning required for continuous improvement.”
Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities continually push themselves to improve and deepen their professional practice and use of proven best practices. Further, Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities simultaneously look for new and innovative ways to do their work, ways not yet discovered or explored.
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