Continuos Improvement Program

The Malaysian school curriculum is committed to developing the child holistically along intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical dimensions, as reflected in the Malaysia’s National Education Philosophy.

In line with that, in my personal view, to manage and develop students’ potential, a school should first be a Learning Organization within itself. Unfortunately, no learning organization is built overnight. I believe that success comes from carefully cultivated attitudes, commitments, and management processes that grow slowly and steadily. The principal should take the first step which is to foster an environment conducive to learning.

People who are in the education line are talking about Continuous Improvement Programs. Related issues are sprouting up all over in schools where academicians strive to do something in order to gain an edge. Unfortunately, failed programs far outnumber successes, and improvement rates remain distressingly low. Why? To me it is because most schools have failed to grasp a basic truth out of it. First and foremost, we must bear in mind that continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning. Can we improve without first learning something new? Solving a problem, introducing a new T&L approach, and reengineering assessment and evaluation processes all require seeing the world in a new light and acting accordingly. In the absence of learning, teacher leaders and teachers simply repeat old practices. Change remains cosmetic, and improvements are most of the time short-lived.

I strongly believe that a school is where people should continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. To achieve these ends, I would strongly suggest the use shared vision, and team learning. In a similar spirit, Ikujiro Nonaka characterized knowledge-creating companies as places where "inventing new knowledge is not a specialized activity but it is a way of behaving, indeed, a way of being, in which everyone is a knowledge worker." Sound idyllic? Absolutely. Desirable? Without question. But the problem that we face is... does it provide a framework for action? Hardly. The recommendations are far too abstract, and too many questions remain unanswered. How, for example, will principals know when their schools have become learning organizations? What concrete changes in behavior are required? What policies and programs must be in place? How do you get from here to there? Most discussions of learning organizations finesse these issues. Their focus is high philosophy and grand themes, sweeping metaphors rather than the gritty details of practice. We need clearer guidelines for practice, filled with operational advice rather than high aspirations. We also need better tools for assessing a school’s rate and level of learning to ensure that gains have in fact been made. For learning to become a meaningful goal, it must first be understood by educational leaders, subject matter experts, teachers, students, parents and the community.