Quality Improvement needs improvement?

After 20 odd years of participating in the very well-intentioned field of quality improvement specialists/coaches/consultants I have come to a new sentiment about what works, what doesn’t, and why. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that people don’t really like to be told to change their behavior, even when asked nicely. They may – and often do – smile and say thanks, now I get it – but in fact that changed behavior isn’t going to stick and likely fades along with the smile.

So my eureka is that we are never going to reach the programs where most of the children are spending their days if we don’t reach out and engage teachers and directors in a new way. We know better than to treat adults as if they were empty vessels and if only we explained it to them, we could make things better. Just explaining hasn’t worked for child advocates to policy makers, either. It takes more. Howard Gardner lists 7 levers of change in his book Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds (a good summary here  https://hbr.org/2008/02/tactics-for-changing-minds-1.html and as long as we narrowly define and implement our ideas about quality child care experiences, we aren’t going to lift the profession out of the rut of “think about quality when the licensing lady is coming”, aka Quality for a Day.

Instead I think we need to inspire and empower teachers and directors so they come to their own motivation for best practices for young children. That happens sometimes in institutions of higher learning, but it also can happen for every teacher – to overcome their unconscionable wages and stressful working conditions and still find ways to do what’s best for children. Telling them about our great ideas doesn’t stick. I wish it did. But we are pursing systems of quality improvement that rarely acknowledge the authentic agency of the individual teachers and directors, their beliefs, values and opinions. Until we start with real relationships and provide professionals with the support they ask us for, we won’t have created a culture where those of us with great ideas will be listened to or welcomed into classrooms. I know, I know, the urgent need is for professional wages. But in the meantime, there are other levers of change and empowerment we can be using. Teacher leadership, reflective practices need time and space outside of classrooms and I wish we could convince policy makers that investing in that is a worthwhile use of funding.

What I have done about this new – for me- way of thinking (although it is actually what I was taught in a thousand forms, from Brazelton’s Touchpoints, authentic leadership, social justice, early brain development, systems change theory, adult learning, Frameworks etc etc etc) is to marvel at how many places we do act from this understanding as responsive teachers but continue to build intervention structures that forget what we know. There are so many wonderful resources out there for teachers and directors now, websites, publications, courses, standards – but for most programs, they are unknown and unavailable. Connecting teachers and directors to these resources and putting the agency for change back to them led me to the write the book Attending to Child Care. It is, as a friend helpfully reframed, a Do It Yourself quality improvement guide.

I am not sure where the proper soapbox is for this proposed change of direction. But since I am in both great and mediocre classrooms all the time, my sense of urgency is personal. It’s in the faces of the teachers, their directors and the children – plain to see. We are not doing enough.