The Visual Standard

by Tom McNaught-Roberts

Something which has been floating around for a while is the idea of Kaizen.

Kaizen is the Japanese concept which I would roughly translate as "a place for everything and everything in its place" although that doesn't quite capture all the complexities of the methodology.

It relies on a cycle of Sort, Set, Shine, Standardise, Sustain.

For example, when designing the peer assessment / RAG area below I had to first sort out what I was going to do - organise myself. I then set up what was going to happen and found a place for it. The shine aspect is making it organised and uncluttered, standardise for this system means planning for its use regularly in lessons as appropriate so that students are aware of how to use the system and sustain beings us to the idea of the visual standard.

Many systems start off with the best intentions yet fail because they are not maintained effectively. Sustaining a system means having regular reviews to ensure it is being followed and crucially making sure that everyone is aware of the expectations. For this I like to use the visual standard, an image of the system at the point of perfection which is then the standard that has to be maintained.

I have also taken this approach with my stationary pots on the students desks and it has helped to drastically minimise the cases of stationary going missing because so long as you have regular checks in place then it is easy to see what has gone missing and identify when it happened.

Like any system it isn't foolproof but it helps me to maintain a working environment which is conducive for efficient working practices - like any teacher time is definitely my most precious and rarest commodity!