W Edwards Deming
Plan, Do, Study, Act; continuous improvement. PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act) refers to a four-step improvement cycle for organizing and managing change and continuous improvement. This cycle was developed by Dr. Walter Shewhart in the 1920s and put into business practice in Japan and the United States by W. Edwards Deming. (Embedded in the PDSA cycle are quality tools to facilitate the process.) It is a strategy used to encourage groups to determine goals, monitor progress, and make rapid changes when results are not achieved. The four stages of plan, do, study, act are essential to continuous improvement success and are the basis for a seven-step improvement process: 1) defining the system; 2) assessing current situation; 3) analyzing causes; 4) trying out an improvement theory; 5) studying the results; 6) standardizing the improvement; and 7) planning for continuous improvement. The plan–do–study–act cycle is a four-step model for carrying out change. Just as a circle has no end, the PDSA cycle should be repeated again and again for continuous improvement (Langley, Nolan, Nolan, Norman & Provost, 1996).
The PDSA cycle. The plan-do-study-act approach incorporates an understanding of systems and their variation into actually changing the system to improve it. The cycle represents a powerful process to support the school system’s sense of purpose and facilitate ongoing learning about that purpose and how it can become reality. This is true regardless of whether it is being utilized by the leadership of the entire school system or by a single teacher in a single classroom. Equipped with an understanding of learning theory as well as systems and their variations, a teacher (or a bus driver, or a principal) can begin to change an entire system. The following is a list of when to use the PDSA model:
- As a model for continuous improvement.
- When starting a new improvement project.
- When developing a new or improved design of a process, product or service.
- When defining a repetitive work process.
- When planning data collection and analysis in order to verify and prioritize problems or root causes.
- When implementing any change.
Getting to the causes of problems in schools is often much more difficult than it sounds; it represents a challenge to the leadership of the organization as well as to its members. The PDSA cycle helps teams of students, teachers, administrators, parents, school board members, and others to focus on causes of problems rather than on sources for blame.
For example, attendance and tardiness are often major problems in schools. Getting students to class on time has always been a concern, for clear reasons. When a student is tardy, the dynamics of the classroom are altered or even disrupted. Every teacher knows how much time is occupied in faculty meetings discussing the kind of abuses that tardiness represents, and the appropriate response to this discipline problem. Do three or four tardies equal an absence? If a student is detained by another teacher, who is accountable for that tardy? This issue and other like it has been debated thousands of times by faculties from elementary schools to universities, and every conceivable kind of penalty has been implemented. In the case of tardiness as with other behavior, policies are often devised to deal only with the exception. Most students are not tardy. Most teachers dress appropriately. Most reports are turned in on time. Most employees do not lie about sick days. Rather than address the special causes in systems as special causes, organizations simply make rules to deal with them as if they are common causes.
Having the confidence to involve students in the process of improvement will change the outcome regardless of what else is done. Schools only rarely involve students in solving or monitoring problems. But after all, there is little reason for anyone to become more than mildly interested in responding to elaborate systems over which they have no control. And when they have not been involved in the design of those systems, they can freely blame someone else for the outcome.
What emerges in any discussion of the improvement process is the traditional tendency to assess blame for problems, and then to determine appropriate punishments. A related issue is the sticky business of evaluating outcomes in such a way that the assessment of progress does not become either an end in itself, or a source of demoralizing punishment to students. This is particularly true in the classroom where traditional grading practices fall into this category.
The Prepared Student 