Some Pathways Provide New Opportunities!

Some pathways promise new opportunities!  However, when you get to the end, the opportunities are deceptive!  In this scene, the pathway is almost a half mile long in a very hot valley . The house beckons the wayfarer with suggestions of shade, water, food comfort and potential friendship!  But alas!  It is all empty.  The doors and windows are locked.  No one lives there and, of course, there are no horses, no cows. At the end of a long hot day, the empty opportunity of this path brings discouragement, and a big thirst for change!

A RESOURCE TO USE FOR MAKING QUALITY CHOICES

Where did the choices go wrong? Maybe a little resource devised by Walter A. Shewart can be helpful.  Shewart’s PDCA Cycle was developed as a tool for solving industrial problems early in the 2Oth Century. However, it might be just the thing to get out of dead end or prevent yourself from getting boxed in!  PDCA  (Plan-Do-Check-Act) was included as a tool for the Quality movement and promoted by Edward Deming as a means for continuous improvement. 

ANTICIPATING THE PATHWAY

I have two friends who raised boys and who, themselves, were good teachers.  Their families had many adventures to national parks, tourist attractions, zoos, and so on.  One of the things that both of the moms did was to insist that the boys, who were 11 and 13, use the internet to find out all about the upcoming adventure and to make a plan about what they wanted to see and do.  This allowed the boys to preview where they were going and to build some anticipation about what they might see and do. This helped to keep the boys engaged in the adventure and take ownership for what they were going to get out of the adventure!  It generally worked very well. And, the boys still had lots to discover once they got to the actual location. The boys did the work, then they compared what they found to what they saw at the adventure site, and then they acted in relation to what they saw. 

APPLYING THE RESOURCE

Planning begins with an idea.  This idea needs to be fleshed out.  The Do is part of the planning.  Every project requires that great learning.  And it is important to do the research, not just dabble in it.  There are many details that need to be considered, and each one of those details are essential. Check means to look closely and compare your results against a standard.  If something is missing, you take Action and to go back through the Plan, the Do, and Check and study what might have gone wrong.  Refinement makes a difference.  Planning, overall, takes many steps. 

We all know people who seem to go from project to project, course to course, management program of the month!  Each of them suffers from the failure to develop the details, do the work of engaging what needed to such as teachers, trainers, videos, books.  They don’t take the time to make the milestones that will allow them to check their work against a standard.  They don’t take action in the moment, nor do they stop and go back to the beginning to see what might have been missing.  In short, they give up. They see the empty building and say “well that’s a bust” and do not even think to go up the hill beyond the log house to where the museum is that has all of the learning resources!  A short visit to the website for the location would have provided background information and more learning opportunities! 

ADVENTURES AT THE ZOO

I tried the anticipatory Plan-Do-Check-Act with my 5 year old daughter.  She wanted to go to the Zoo. So I asked her what she thought she would see at the zoo.  She said Tigers and Bears!  That let me know that she was interested in specific areas of the zoo.  So we looked at pictures of different types of tigers and different types of bears. We watched videos about bears and tigers. We talked about tigers and bears and what they do.  We made growls like tigers and bears!  We pretended to be tigers and bears! 

We also talked about how we would be walking at the zoo and what might make our walk more comfortable (i.e. a hat, a bottle of water).  I suggested the stroller that I used to take her with me when I would go jogging. She put her hands on her hips and said, “Mom! I am not a baby, you know! I can walk.”  So we settled for sneakers. The day that we went, instead of traipsing up every alley and through every display, we followed the path to the tigers and then over to the bears. 

We checked out what we saw with what we had learned from the pictures and videos we had watched about tigers and bears. She saw new things.  The tiger was much bigger than a kitty cat and he had huge teeth!  The bear looked nothing like Winne the Pooh in real life, and he was very stinky. On the way out of the zoo, she was eagerly looking around at the other exhibits we passed by and said, “Can we come back and see the parrots and the snakes next time?”  And then we went to have some ice cream.  It was a very nice day at the zoo.