Hills, J.A. (2004). Better Teaching

Hills, J.A. (2004). Better teaching with Deming and Bloom. Quality Progress. 37(3). 57-64.

The author, who is a teacher close to retirement, was frustrated with the amount of success his writing class students were having. Many of them were dropping out and those who remained in the class were getting C's and D's. The teacher decided that his traditional methods of lecturing, quizzes and tests and standard homework assignments were not 'making the grade.' So he decided to conduct an experiment within his classroom. He devised his own model of instruction that combined Benjamin Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy and Blue-Ribbon Tutoring Concepts with W. Edward Deming's model of total quality management.

The author used these two famous models to develop a quality control sheet (from Deming) and to turn Bloom's taxonomy into a rubric. He also incorporated the Helpdesk strategy, which required students to meet with the teacher at the Helpdesk to receive assignments and to discuss areas in need of improvement. The author tracked the students' progress in a footnote system consisting of scores of 1 or 0 in each of the five categories of competence outlined by Bloom: Sentence structure, idea development, organization, conventions and word choice.

The author uses an example of a fictitious student named Hank to demonstrate the process of mentoring the student through the Helpdesk to improve his writing skills. He provides fictitious dialogue between the mentor and the student, making a strong point that acting as a mentor rather than a lecturer is key. He described how the mentor has helped Hank improve in each of the five areas by not telling him what to do, but helping him figure our how to make his work "reader friendly." The author has great confidence in this process.

Discussion of Author's Main Point

The author's main point is that traditional methods of instruction are not effective in writing classes. He believes he has come up with a teaching strategy that will allow students to improve their writing skills in a continuous and systematic manner. The main benefit of his system, Hill asserts, is that "it can reveal the errors in learning shortly after they occur, and if appropriate corrections are introduced as they are needed, the educational system can be a self-correcting system so errors made at one time can be corrected before they are compounded with later errors." This philosophy is rooted in W. Edward Deming's total quality management philosophy, which emphasizes correcting problems at the source rather than simply discarding mistakes at the end of the production line.

Identification of Main Elements of the Argument

The main elements of the article are as follows:

1) Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy (with the ultimate goal of mastery) makes an ideal rubric for assessing student progress in writing

2) W. Edward Deming's Quality Control Sheet provides an ideal format for tracking student progress in each of five areas based on a binary footnote system.

3). Combining these instruments with a Helpdesk/mentoring approach to instruction as opposed to traditional lecturing and tests, will help correct important problems in individual students' writing before they compound into bigger and more complex problems.

4). Deming's "plan-do-check-act cycle," which follows a constructivist type of approach to building upon previous knowledge and planning assignments together, will promote mastery and continuous progress.

5). This strategy allows the teacher to customize assignments to address the student's current deficiencies as well as to make rational predictions regarding the student's future progress.

Discussion of Conclusion

Hills ran this 'experiment' in his classroom for the next five years, up until his retirement. He reports that "total enrollment in the helpdesk program at semester's end was 25% more than for students enrolled in the same program taught traditionally by various teachers throughout the years. Moreover, 30% more helpdesk students passed the departmental final. Exit surveys showed 99% of the students preferred the helpdesk approach to traditional instruction."

It is possible, of course, that the reason everyone liked this system better was not because it improved their writing skills but because the teacher stopped giving quizzes, tests, midterms and finals. Moreover, Hill reports that he used to spend 16 hours a week lecturing, and now he uses that time to mentor students individually. Thus while Hills may still be putting in the same amount of hours, his students, who are only mentored for minutes at a time each day, are bound to be happy about the reduced investment of their own time. While Hills does state that those students who were not willing to work hard and show progress "phased themselves out" he does not provide any real evidence that the reason for his system's popularity was based on the pride of personal achievement as opposed to taking an 'easier road'.

Identification of At Least Two Problems or Strengths

Starting with the positive, the main strength of this article (and its content) is that it provides ideas for developing helpful evaluation and tracking tools for teachers to measure student progress. Moreover, each of these tools is based on time-honored, proven models devised by experts (although Deming's model is traditionally associated with manufacturing rather than teaching). The article also flows in a very "reader-friendly" manner, as Hills himself would describe it.

The weakness of the article rest primarily on the overly optimistic and evidence-deficient assessment of Hills' model. Obviously, the author is prone to be biased in favor of his own model. However, Hills' takes this to the extreme, noting absolutely no defects in his model, and essentially hailing it as the perfect remedy to poor writing instruction. While he provides a few statistics about how much the students liked the new system, these figures are essentially meaningless without hard evidence to back up their levels of improvement. The only 'evidence' Hills provides is in the form of a fictitious student with fictitious scores. There is also a considerable lack of support from the scholarly literature to support his conjectures, with the only two references provided being a book by Benjamin Bloom and a secondary source regarding Deming's management approach. Finally, Hills takes very little time to explain the fundamentals of the models he is deriving his own paradigm from (i.e. Bloom's Cognitive Taxonomy and Deming's Total Quality Management).