If you’ve spent some time digging into student assessment data with your team or faculty, your group will be prepared to uncover causes. It’s only when we really get to the cause that effective solutions start to surface. A combination of the 5 Whys protocol and a fishbone analysis can get your thinking going in the right direction.
The
Fishbone is a structured team process for identifying underlying factors or
causes of an event. The product of the team’s work is a cause/effect diagram
that might look something like this:
Or this,
if you’ve got a group of creative teachers!
Fishbones
help us consider lots of alternate causes and sort ideas into useful
categories.
Here
are the steps in the process. Working in small groups, ask:
1.
What is the problem/effect? Be clear & specific. Be
careful not to define the problem in terms of a solution! Write this at the head of the fish.
2.
What might be the major
categories of causes of the problem?
(for example, materials, policy factors, people/staff factors, etc.). Write
these on the large skeletal bones.
3.
Brainstorm possible causes for
each category. These
are the smaller bones.
4.
For each cause, ask, “Why does
this happen?” Write
these sub-causes as branches on your diagram.
Similar
to the interview process described in last
week’s post, asking “Why?” multiple times along the way can ensure deep
causal thinking rather than more obvious solutions that get too-easily tagged. In
the fishbone analysis, it means adding sub-causes to the “bone structure”
through fine-grained analysis.
Here’s
how it works: Someone states what they think is a cause. For example, if I ask
someone why they were late for work,
they might answer, “I was late for work because I ran out of gas.” Asking, “Why did you run out of gas?” reveals yet another layer to the
problem: “I ran out of gas because I didn’t buy any on my way to work.” “Why didn’t you buy any on your way to
work?” you might ask. “Because I didn’t have any money!” “Why didn’t you have any money?” “Because I bought these gorgeous
shoes last night!” might be the response. “Why?”
“Because when I see a gorgeous pair of shoes, I just have to have them even
though I already have a closet full of shoes!”
Aha!
Now we have revealed that the root cause of being late to work is a shoe fetish!
Without the 5 Whys protocol, we would never have known! Of course, 5 is not a
magic number. The point is, go deep enough to get at real answers to the
question. The final “Why” should lead to a root-cause statement that helps the
team take action.
The
fishbone analysis, accompanied by the 5 Why’s, encourages a deeper
consideration of the data and a focus on underlying problems. When we see dips
in the data of student achievement, it’s most effective to solve directly-stated
problems rather than proposing solutions to surface-level issues.
(More
ideas for peeling back the layers coming next week.)
This week, you might want to
take a look at:
Rewinding
to have hope at the beginning of a school year:
Incorporate movement while teaching
about the water cycle:
The power of written conversations
(good for PD and classrooms!):
Mentor texts with different organizational structures:
Apps for the low- or no-Internet classroom:
That’s it for this week. Happy
Coaching!
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