As we start end-of-grade and end-of-course testing this week, we know there will be a focus on the results. With all the challenges and opportunities this school year has encountered, we will all still be measured by the impact we had on student learning. Through the continuous cycle of improvement, does leadership ever hinder the process of improvement? Are we part of the problem or part of the solution?
This reminds me of the story of Dr. Semmelweis, a maternity doctor in
Vienna around 1846. This was "the
start of the golden age of the physician scientist." This was the era when
doctors were shifting from thinking of illness as an imbalance caused by bad
air or evil spirits. They looked instead science and doctors got interested in
numbers and collecting data. Dr.
Semmelweis was a maternity doctor at General Hospital in Vienna and wanted to
figure out why so many women in maternity wards were dying from puerperal
fever — commonly known as childbed fever.
He compared two maternity wards in the hospital: one was staffed by all
male doctors and medical students, and the other was staffed by female
midwives. When he crunched the numbers,
he discovered that women in the clinic staffed by doctors and medical students
died at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives' clinic. The quest was “why”? What was the root cause?
Dr. Semmelweis looked for every possible difference between the clinics. He noticed women laid on their sides to deliver in the midwives’ clinic and on their back in the doctor’s clinic, there was a priest that walked through the doctor’s clinic and an attendant ringing a bell but not in the midwives’ clinic, and even the routes and routines of each clinic. He made a hypothesis, tried the change, and came back to the drawing board each time. Dr. Semmelweis had a colleague, a pathologist, that got ill and died from puerperal fever from a needle prick. He then realized puerperal fever was not limited to only women after childbirth but was contracted by others in the hospital. This still didn’t explain “why” so many people in the doctor’s clinic were dying from the sickness. After digging a little further, he discovered that the normal routines for doctors during that era was to do autopsies and scientific research with cadavers in the morning and attend to patients in the afternoon. The big difference between the doctors' ward and the midwives' ward is that the doctors were doing autopsies and the midwives weren't. Semmelweis hypothesized that there were cadaverous particles, little pieces of corpse, that students were getting on their hands from the cadavers they dissected. And when they delivered the babies, these particles would get inside the women who would develop the disease and die. So he ordered his medical staff to start cleaning their hands and instruments not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. And when he imposed this, the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically. What Semmelweis had discovered is something that still holds true today: Hand-washing is one of the most important tools in public health.
In education and all organizations, it’s important to keep working to
the root cause of “why” and not simply to stop at “what” was the cause. Sometimes we can have great intentions but
actually may be part of what prevents performance increases. Sometimes you can be so ingrained and involved in the work that we don't see the big picture or the potential alternatives/solutions. No one does it intentionally, but the adage of
“that’s the way we’ve always done it" permeates many educational settings even
when we know something isn’t working effectively. We hope that everyone comes to work and does
the very best they are capable of with the knowledge, skill sets, and capacity
they currently have. It’s the job of
administration to make sure we are always pushing to increase performance and
build capacity. It’s a function of
leadership to make sure the ship gets to the right destination, not just
management to make sure it runs well. It's a function of leadership to make sure the organization has a solutions focus! One of the best football coaches I ever played for or coached with said "There is no such thing as staying the same. You're either getting better or someone else is and they'll go by you if you don't constantly try to improve." The best way to move from a problem focus to a solutions focus is to start working on it. Let’s
make sure that we constantly reflect, constantly raise expectations, and
constantly not allow complacency so that we are always striving to be part of
the solution instead of being part of the problem!
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