Coaching Through Continuous Feedback: A Practical Guide to Improve Performance on the Job

Business & Money

Chang, R.

Management & Leadership

American Productivity & Quality Center

Far from being a stagnant process, problem solving requires creativity, judgment, and insight. However, flashes of brilliance seldom occur in a vacuum. Systematic analysis stimulates insight. This book can help both teachers and administrators add structure to common sense. This guidebook provides practical examples and organizational tools to tackle specific problems and find enduring solutions. An approachable and flexible problem-solving process is introduced and explained in a step-by-step fashion. Learn how to: --systematically approach problems; --communicate in a common language; --organize relevant information; --build consensus; --make objective, informed decisions; --devise effective solutions; and --monitor progress. Using helpful tools for idea generation, data collection, analysis, implementation, and measurement, this book details how to efficiently ensure problems are fully and systematically addressed.

Solving Problems in Schools: A Guide for Educators

Leavitt, Paige

Innovative products are the lifeline for any corporation to sustain prosperity. Approximately one-third of the average organization's sales come from new or drastically improved products. At the same time, the span for time-to-market is accelerating for most industries, and product life cycles are diminishing. And despite the costs involved, many product launches still fail to yield significant returns. 
The obvious answer to facing the risks involved in this competitive imperative is to develop a systematic approach to new product development (NPD). A less understood necessity is that that this systematic approach must be bolstered by wide-scale efforts to cultivate an innovative workplace. 
This paperback guidebook removes the mystery and complexity surrounding profitable new business growth through breakthrough innovation and synthesizes it into practical methods based on proven experiences by describing the five pillars that are essential for building breakthrough innovation. In addition to detailing an excellent approach to customer-inspired strategic innovation based on his own extensive experience, Ron Kubinski, formerly of 3M, provides the tools and templates for practitioners to put his knowledge into action and make it their own. 
For managers frustrated by the ostensible oxymoron of fostering productivity in an environment flexible enough to encourage creative ideas, this book can help. For engineers, marketers, and other NPD practitioners, this book can guide you, step by step, to carry a breakthrough idea to product launch, on time and on budget. 
Rather than being a mysterious magical process or just plain luck, customer-inspired strategic innovation can be orchestrated. This book will show you how.

Building a Breakthrough Business Through Significant New Business Growth and Profitability

Kubinski, Ron

Most schools already have the data they need to make significant improvements. The key is to find it, understand it, and act on it. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act tasks educators with more than just reporting results: the mandate is now clearer than ever for educators, from teachers to district administrators, to act on those results to improve each student's performance. A single composite score for a school will likely be of little use to educators. Instead, educators will need to leverage existing data and break it down for greater meaning that can be applied to the campus and the classroom. It is critical to make the most of the data educators already have in hand, both from the NCLB act and other existing sources, to improve student performance. To proceed, all educators will need an understanding of why it is important to disaggregate data, how leveraging data can lead to more informed decision making, and how to interpret results. Disaggregating Data in Schools details what data disaggregation is and why it is necessary, types and sources of data and tests, how to break down data using technology support, how to understand test data, and how data can be used at each level. Both district and campus level staff and teachers can benefit from using the terms and ideas presented in this book to initiate a common dialogue for continuous improvement.

Disaggregating Data in Schools: Leveraging the Information You Have

McDaniel, Randy

Skogstad, Emma

Inspired by APQC's most popular title Closing the Achievement Gap: No Excuses, this book captures success stories and important lessons from districts and campuses across the nation that are making a concerted effort to initiate real and sustainable change. Like hundreds of campuses across the nation, the ten schools highlighted in this book have adapted principles from the plan-do-check-act instructional cycle and it's popular, derivative eight-step process. 
Many of the schools have embraced this approach based on the successes of one district, detailed in Closing the Achievement Gap. The story of Texas' Brazosport ISD is one in which students from impoverished and ethnically diverse backgrounds perform up to par with students from wealthier backgrounds, all due to an adjusted mindset in process improvement. 
Whereas Closing the Achievement Gap provides an in-depth explanation of how the steps were applied at Brazosport, Educators in Action provides powerful examples of exactly how the process is adapted and how schools can make the eight-step process their own. This book is also compelling evidence that the process can work for any district or campus. 
Each chapter in this book tells a unique story, with in-depth profiles of: Marion County Public Schools in Florida, Arizona's Crane Elementary School District, Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia, Saint Paul Public Schools, Roswell Independent School District in New Mexico, Florida's Highlands County Schools, the Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp. in Indiana, Fontana Unified School District in California, Horry County School District in South Carolina, and Muscatine High School in Iowa. 
Districts, schools, and individual educators can take away valuable findings to adapt to their own classrooms. Most importantly, the chapters cite tangible results that can help educators gain support to initiate real and sustainable improvements.

Educators in Actions: Examining Strategic Improvement Efforts