What can be done to improve "Quality" in Schools?

Dear All, I would like to mention about a philosophy I have been admiring since 1992: "Continuous Improvement". Due to some misunderstandings in my country, I try not to use the term "Total Quality" especialy for educational settings. In fact TQM is not only a management system or an affective approach, but a "life style". I believe that with the "human focus & Customer satisfaction" side, it is so much convenient to be applied at classrooms and in schools.
It is not in vain to write many books about TQE for years. My first book "On the Way of Creating Schools of Quality, 1998" used to share the history, philosophy, implementation and tools of quality in schools. Last year, my last book appeared under the title of "Continuous Learner: Me!". I love publicizing that sacred approach everytime, everywhere.
With the "Correct" leading of this philosophy, this philosophy creates a real "change". As we all know, it appeared as a outcome of "Systems Approach" in 1960s. It followed the normal path in the science of "Management" and after the business world, it has been affcetive in educational administration. I believe that, it is a miracle. After the 2. World War, Japan was in a terrible situation but through TQM it has become one of the richest giants of the world. I know, they ove this to correct TQM applications. Through "Kaizen", it creates a real wellness miracle within persons and organizations. In Türkiye, we had an educational system; "Village Institutions" carrying similar characteristics but they were unfortunately closed in 10 years' time due to some political reasons. If they still existed, our villages would have been in a totally different view.
With this belief, I have been working on "İmece Circles" which are now almost 1000. This qualitfocused work is mostly called as "Quality Circles" by others, but I define them as "İmece (Collaboration) circles" as a result of its national-cultural localization to Turkish schools. This sytem was localized and publicized with a different philosophy and content by me to make it applicable to the new Curriculum of the primarys and secondary schools in Türkiye. I had done a similar implementation for the Worldwide Innovative Teachers Program of Microsoft. I was the advisor of the program, and I had localized and implemented the pilot studies of the program for the Turkish educators between the years of 2004-2008. I have started those İmece Circles in 2001 and it was awarded by the World Bank as one of the "Creative Projects for the Development of Türkiye" in 2005. ICT Seagulls Projects have been going on with this system for 6 years and so is "2010 Bigg-İst project". I also wrote another book which is called "İmece Circles for the Power Unity at Classrooms" in 2004. It includes the road maps of first 16 İmece Projects and the book can be obtained from http://www.pandora.com.tr/ . I believe it is a big achievement to be leading 1000 projects now, after the first 16 projects of 2003. I still get very positive feedbacks of those projects and I fill with joy (Please visit: http://www.bilisimcimartilar.com/). Furthermore, the results of similar projects at various countries show similar results. We had shared all those projects during the 11.ICSQCC on 26-28 August, 2008 in Istanbul with the support of CMS and WCTQEE (Visit: www.hayalkoksal.com/en/convention).
The initial phase of İmece Circles starts with the "TQE Awareness & İmece-Project Management Seminars" in which participants learn the quality philosophy and tools. That is why I set aside the first two weeks of my each term to basic seminars in my courses at the Faculties of Education. The above photos were taken during my "Innovative Teaching" course at my first seminar in Boğaziçi University yesterday. Next week, at the same hall I will be giving the second seminar about İmece Circles. Everyone is invited to it, as usual.
BThe most important characteristics of those seminars are teaching the following skills to the youngesters;
- The Continuous Improvement Philosophy which exists within every human being,
-Collaboration,i.e., İmece Culture,
-Time management,
-Leadership, communication and effective technology use skills,
-Problem solving skills, and -By removing "stage fear", teaching presentation skills for sharing the results with the public. We also conducted these projects at pre-school education institutions and we saw very fruitful results. We added the challenged students into this program. Up to now, we noticed that very few projects were not completed. When we analysed the reasons, we realized that the following reasons had put obstacles in front of the project's. They are;
- Lacking leadership of teachers and / or administrators,
- Technological problems at schools,
- Jealousy, laziness and different negative personal characteristics of person.
As it is seen clearly understood, there is no definite obstacled before the İmece Projects. The only reason is related to the problems concerning the personal qualities of some educators. Whereas, it is the primary mission of both teachers and parents to be good models and to motivate the students to obtain the optimal results. My next paper will be about personal quality. If I get your comments, I will be pleased. I wish you good luck on your quality journey. Dr.Hayal KÖKSAL