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A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers | Langford Learning | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers
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all it goes back to understanding a
system and that is the way I taught the
Japanese top
Management in
1950 the aim of the
system draw a flow
diagram what happens what happens
next and in that flow diagram anybody
May see what his job
is a flow diagram is an organization
chart anybody that works there be maybe
pupil maybe teacher maybe principal
maybe a parent and see what his job
is the problem is that a manufacturing
flowchart what Dr Deming taught the
Japanese does not appear to apply to a
school or a hospital or a police station
for instance but it does if we change
the labels we do not mean to imply that
educating young people is exactly the
same as making a ton of Steel it isn't
but understanding the system in the
plant or in the school is the same and
to help us understand Dr Deming has
expert help a system Sciences educator
Dr Russell
aoff the characteristic way of
management that we have taught in the
western world is take a complex system
divide it into parts and then try to
manage each part as well as as possible
and if that's done the system as a whole
will behave well and that's absolutely
false because it's possible to improve
the performance of each part taken
separately and destroy the system at the
same time this is not a criticism of
students parents teachers principes
superintendents or anyone else in
education this is not about people in
the system this is about the system
itself look what the education system
does the
creativity uh every child learns at a
very early stage that when they're ask
the question in
school they must first ask themselves a
question what answer does the asker
expect that's the way you get through
school by providing people with the
answers they
expect one thing about an answer that
somebody else expects is it can't be
creative because it's already known what
we ought to be trying to do with
children is get them to give us answers
that we don't expect what we produce is
a group of people who think in the way
we have been thinking for years rather
than departing and developing new
Concepts and new ways of
understanding yes a check block
system which is the right answer a b or
c mark it
off that is not
teaching that's
the student learns information he learns
the right answer marks it off that's
right I'd rather Johnny would tell me
under what circumstances would a be the right
right
answer under what circumstances would it
be the wrong answer same for b and
c and with a lot of things most
everything maybe there is no right
answer but I think the point is that
while a fact does Exist by itself it
isn't enough we have to know what
context that fact is in and how we are
going to use it there's a very basic
distinction between the various forms of
content of the human
mind there's data information knowledge
understanding and
wisdom the educational system never
makes a distinction between them and as
a result children come through the
system with a great deal of information
very little knowledge and no
understanding and virtually zero
wisdom data are individual facts symbols
that represent objects or events you
hear scientists talking about raw data
what they mean is they have facts but
until those facts can be processed they
have no meaning they don't tell us
anything when data are processed they
become information information answers
the reporter's questions who what when
where and how to answer how to questions
you need knowledge then from
explanations you get understanding
children do not constantly ask why only
to drive their parents crazy they are
trying to learn to acquire knowledge to
understand the world around them finally
as you understand you may acquire wisdom
which is the ability to see and evaluate
the long-term consequences of our
actions the problem with most education
is that it rarely gets to wisdom or
understanding or knowledge most
education is devoted to information how
many people did the best job they could
David Langford now a quality education
consultant introduced the Deming quality
method to Mount edcom High School in
Sitka Alaska it's now estimated that you
only remember about
10% of what you learned for those tests
while you were in school so if you
really think about that there's a lot of
waste in that system if you're simply
focused on trying to uh memorize
information so I can use that later on
how do we design a system which
distributes its effort more evenly
across these types of content in the human
human
mind see information is contained in
descriptions knowledge and
instruction understanding and
explanation and we don't explain reality to
to
children now passed the course by claring
claring
information that's right fter head full
of information
yeah all the capitals of all the states
that's right that's not that's not
knowledge absolutely not I couldn't give
a couldn't care less about such a
thing but what's really important is the
ability the ability to learn how to
learn that no matter what situation I
find myself in I'm able to assess what's
there perhaps collect some data that
would give me some information about how
I might uh proceed and understand the
situation then learn how to access other
resources such as other people or teams
of people or or access resources
resources through Tech technology that
would enable you to uh find information
that you might need so what you're
really talking about is the ability
ability to learn how to learn despite
how it often appears most Educators do
not believe that all of education is
about passing standardized tests but
what we do in schools now grows out of
how we think and how we think grows out
of the Curiosity of
children uh in the
Renaissance when man began to
investigate the nature of man and the
environment which man lived he also
invented a way of thinking he actually
copied it from
children if you look at a child when a
child has given something they have
never seen before and they're confronted
with a need to understand it a child
goes through a three-step process the
first thing they do is take it
apart the second thing you do is try to
understand the behavior of each part taken
taken
separately and then they try to
aggregate the understanding of the parts
into an understanding of the
whole that's
analysis please remember that analysis
means to separate the whole into parts
and study each part
individually an analysis became the
dominant mode of thought in the western
world for almost 400 years in fact even
today we use analysis and thinking as
synonymous terms that's the way we
manage we take corporations and schools
apart into departments or disciplines
try to run each one and then aggregate
them into a hole you cannot explain the
behavior of a system by
analysis you can reveal its structure
and say how it works but you can't say
why it works the way it does now a
simple example is the British drive on
the other side of the street their
steering wheel is on the right ours is
on the left now I can give you and
automobile mechanics all the English and
American cars you want and disassemble
them from now to Doomsday and you'll
never explain why one drives on the
right and the other drives on the left
because explanation never lies inside of
a system it lies outside a system cannot
understand itself Dr Baker says in the
Ford Company the system cannot
understand itself you can learn all
about ice know very little about
water he said that if you want to find
out how something works you use analysis
but but if you want to understand why it
works the way it does then you use
synthesis analysis tells you how
synthesis tells you why you need both
and they are both important you knew
that no I read it in Dr aov's book
creating the corporate
future a very simple example would be if
you took one each of every make of
automobile available in the United
States and brought them together and had
a group of Engineers decide which one
had the best engine perhaps a
Rolls-Royce which had the best
transmission which the best alternator
and for each part required for an
automobile found the best one available
if you then instructed the engineers to
take those parts off the Automobiles and
assemble the best possible automobile
out of all the best parts you would not
get an automobile no it would not run no
the parts wouldn't fit and that's the
critical part about a system it not work
together right so it's the working
together that's the main contribution of
systemic thinking as opposed to working apart
apart
separately yeah so easy it is to observe
to see to
understand and yet people do not know
about it the performance of the whole is
never the sum of the performance of the
parts taken separately but it's a
product of their
interactions and therefore the basic
managerial idea introduced by syst
system's thinking is that to manage a
system effectively you must focus on the
interactions of the parts rather than
their behavior taken
system the system must be defined the
aim must be stated and it must be
managed when you're making a product or
delivering a service
service
quality is is
what will help a
customer and enas him to
vet now what do we mean by quality in
education you mean the ability to
think or to pass test question of how do
you get people to think
systemically I think was best answered
by a vice president at Bell Telephone
Laboratories back in the
1950s when he invented a procedure
that's come to be known as idealized
redesign what he said is the only way
that we can think creatively about a
system is to assume it was destroyed
last night it no longer exists so the
education system United States was
destroyed last night now if you could do
whatever you wanted to right now to
replace it what would you do if you were completely
completely
unconstrained his argument was because
if you don't know what you would do when
you can do whatever you want right now
then how can you possibly know what to
do when you can't do whatever you
want that forces you to study the whole
and study the parts taken separately so
in idealized redesign you design the
system as a whole and then derive the
property of the parts from the
properties of the hole as opposed to
analytical design where you start by
taking the parts and extracting the
properties of the whole from the
characteristics of the
parts see we spent an awful lot of time
improving the quality of things that are
to be destroyed isn't that interesting
so right J you can take almost any
aspect of our society we haven't
rethought the design of it for many
years and as they become dysfunctional
dysfunctionality we have to redesign
most of our
products and not merely improve the
quality of the existing product you may
uh reduce defects to zero goout the
business that's right that's exactly
happen and that's what uh this whole
process has get you to look at about how
your system operates how you can improve
the system how you can work with uh say
Society or if you're in business and external
external
customer to work with him to improve
processes or I can how can work with a
supplier or a source where students come
from if that's parents and elementaries
and that process as a whole instead of
just trying to improve tiny parts of
that system because we've been able to
do that for years and it hasn't GI given
us any systemic change or Improvement in
the whole
process as we look at the whole system
of Education a lot of what we believe
about teaching and learning turns out to
be wrong
the most discussions of Education assume
that the best way to learn a subject is
to have it taught to you that's
nonsense we've all learned our first
language without having a taught to us
we never learn a second language as well
through a teacher most of what we use
professionally we learned on the job not
in school most of what we learned in
school is either
obsolete uh or out of date or
wrong on the other hand anybody who's
ever taught knows that teaching is a
wonderful way to
learn and therefore if we want people to
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