Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

Virtues and Supplemental Instruction

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to carry out what I sometimes jokingly refer to as "Virtue Ethics evangelism."  I'd been invited to submit a workshop proposal for a one-day conference held down at City University of New York (CUNY)-Lehman, focused specifically on Supplemental Instruction, bringing together educators from many different disciplines and schools, mainly from across the CUNY system schools but including a scattering of others from upstate schools -- and me, a philosopher, virtue ethicist, representing my fledgling consulting company, ReasonIO.

At my last academic position, at Fayetteville State University, where I'd focused heavily on teaching and improving the core Critical Thinking classes, I recruited -- or at least attempted to, since the better candidates were nearly always courted by other programs -- and worked with, student Supplemental Instruction leaders.  I'd given some thought to the successes and failures we'd encountered in semester after semester of classes assisted by SI, and now provided with an opportunity to reflect on those matters in the somewhat more sustained, systematic, and rigorous ways that producing a conference presentation requires, I proposed a session linking Virtue Ethics with Supplemental Instruction, arguing the need or at least usefulness of the former in thinking about and doing the latter well.