What is lean learning?
Look out the window during a class or a training session, and that should be enough for you to decide whether or not you are spending your time on something valuable (hint: if you get distracted by the clouds or by birdsong, the answer is probably “no”).
Conventional wisdom holds that skills are best developed through instruction, that knowledge is acquired through teaching, and that problem-solving capabilities are cultivated through group work and training. However, the student is usually treated as the product, not the customer, and the conventional learning process is usually done in batches. Lean principles tell us we should always avoid batches; instead, we should “produce” according to customer demand and pull. As we have discovered at The Learning Trust over the years, this applies to the learning process as much as to manufacturing.
Three years ago, I observed and categorized more than 500 learning sessions in various schools and colleges over the space of three months. Based on the dynamics of the room, quickly and simply, I formed an opinion about the different sessions. I organized them into five categories:
- Quality learning – the session left me with the impression that something special was happening.
- Purposeful learning – in the session, students showed attention, focus and a clear sense of purpose.
- A mix of focus and inattention.
- Hard to decide (usually when individual or silent work was under way).
- Poor atmosphere, no apparent structure to the session, or boredom/misbehavior.
In the photo below, how would you rate the type of learning of these young people?
The idea behind this process was to provide simple indicators related to a specific moment, accumulating them to form a picture of overall trends. My biggest fear was seeing many examples of boredom, which is to learning what a chronic disease is to health – draining, numbing and removing hope and ambition. The acute problems I observed didn't worry me much – just pull the andon and work hard to fix them permanently, as lean teaches us. Overall, I found a safe learning process between categories 2 and 3, and some inspiring learning and some dull learning. I was concerned about the amount of time spent on activities that required compliance and cooperation but did not seem to add value to the process. I saw a huge opportunity in allowing students to provide feedback to create a virtuous circle of more added value.
THE CUSTOMER IS THE PRODUCT
You may be familiar with the old joke: “What do you teach?”; “I teach children”. But when we think about the impact our teaching has, a deeper discussion about product and customer becomes necessary. Part of our journey at The Learning Trust (which includes three schools near Chester, UK) was to define who the customer is – the people for whom we are creating value –, and our conclusion was that the child is both the product and the customer.
This insight enabled increasingly radical improvements in our schools and workshops. Lean is a strategy pioneered by Toyota that is familiar to engineers and manufacturers around the world. What we have discovered is that this more humane and empowering approach to change can bring surprising improvements in the way we train and educate children. In fact, lean is a learning strategy.
In our early work, generously supported by the Toyota team at the Deeside engine plant, we assumed that eliminating waste in the classroom would mean identifying redundant practices, such as registration, transition and start-up time – the parts of a lesson that don't focus on learning. Involving students as customers, however, transformed that view, because they have a very clear understanding of what value-adding learning is. In a recent lean experiment, students at our three schools were asked to time the parts of lessons in which they believed they were learning and then explain what made those activities effective. The results and ideas were fascinating and allowed teachers and leaders to design out the wasted time in their lessons and programs of study, focusing on what worked for students and delivering it in a “pull” model, seeing students both as the customer, whose needs had to be met, and as the product – the very demonstration of those needs. The results of the experiments will be shared at the Global Learning Lean Summit in October.
PIONEERING EFFORTS
Chester International School – part of The Learning Trust – is the first lean school in the UK. We hope the experiments and the work we are doing will inspire more schools around the world to adopt lean principles.
In practice, however, what does a lean approach to learning mean for the different actors involved?
To begin with, we found that transparency and openness are necessary. Students know exactly where they are going and how they should get there. They also know they have the means and the responsibility to catch up whenever they fall behind for any reason. Part of this culture of openness is ensuring there are no unpleasant surprises: students and their parents are kept fully aware of progress and next steps throughout the year.
Greater openness from staff is also needed, because it will be up to them, the people closest to the work, to make the changes. The key to learning or education, as elsewhere, is getting people to take ownership of their own work. The work is theirs, and they are in the best position to improve it.
Positive change begins with teams defining their own value-added work. When a team has a clear idea of its contribution, it is easier to identify redundant practices and inefficiencies. It is the team's buy-in that drives change and ensures improvements continue even when management is focusing on other activities. This effect is especially powerful when the teams themselves are empowered to decide how to allocate the resources saved. Because lean thinking requires people to identify their own contribution to value-creating work and to design their own improvements around it, the result is not only the progressive elimination of waste, but a fundamental cultural change across the whole learning environment.
A WORD OF CAUTION
What about leadership? There is still a very clear and important role for them in setting the goals and the pace of improvement work and in the quality assurance process. A word of caution is needed, however: if school leaders decide to adopt lean thinking, they need to commit to it fully and honor the methodology in its entirety (a pick-and-mix approach does not generate systemic and sustainable improvements).
Lean learning is an approach that requires those at the top to share power in very meaningful ways. For example, a senior leader should not identify specific efficiencies and improvements, because that is up to the frontline teams.
Lean is a unique approach to problem solving that empowers employees with a sharper sense of the value of their contribution and a reinforced commitment to meeting students' needs. It has the potential to change the entire culture and mindset of a school. It has been shown to deliver remarkable, measurable benefits, from achieving better results in national math exams to saving hundreds of staff hours in internal assessment processes.
