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I was surprised to learn–from my wife, no less–that I unconsciously assess things (especially edible things) on a personal scale with almost as many degrees as a thermometer.

It’s an understatement scale, I guess, because even as my approval increases, the terminology is…less than exuberant, as in these examples:

• That’s okay.  (Barely acceptable.)
• That’s not bad.
• Not half bad.  (Well above average.)
• Not bad at all.
• That’s all right. (At least one Michelin star.)
• Pretty good.  (At least two.)

There’s a theoretical maximum, “really good.”  It’s like absolute zero, only warmer; you don’t find it much in nature.

I asked my children whether they’d ever heard me apply these terms.  They couldn’t say, because it’s hard to talk when you’re convulsed in laughter.

The purpose of a scale is twofold: measuring and evaluating.  Measuring is a comparison with some standard: you’re this tall (in inches, in cubits, in stacked-up poker chips).  You typed 268 characters in 3 minutes and made 4 errors.

Evaluating is forming a judgment, usually by means of a further comparison.  You’re tall for a 14-year-old boy.  You meet the minimum speed required for this job.

Thanks to Stephen Downes’s OLDaily, I came across Clarence Fisher’s connecting assessment.  It’s a rubric he created for middle schoolers “to help students think about the connections and global understandings they are establishing.”

He doesn’t plan to assign grades based on where students are–this is a conversation starter, he says.  To me, it’s a way to say to the student, “This is how it might look if you’re at a beginner level of skill.  This is more-than-beginner.  This is how it looks if you’re accomplished.”

Fisher offered another rubric in an earlier post–one to help grade student blog posts.

What I like about these is that Fisher shares what he’s come up with for a particular situation.  He even provides Google doc versions (blogging rubric, connecting rubric) in case someone wants to use them as starting points.

Pretty good, I’d say.

“Approval scale” image adapted from this CC-licensed photo by mag3737 / Tom Magliery
(images are his; cartoon balloons are mine).

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, and the first thing to come to mind was this song from Peggy Seeger.

When I was a little girl I wished I was a boy.
I tagged along behind the gang and wore my corduroys
Everybody said I only did it to annoy,
But I was gonna be an engineer.

A recent interview with Dr. Peter J. Pronovost dealt with safer ways to care for patients in hospitals.  Pronovost is the medical director for the Quality and Safety Research Group at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

The interview’s worth reading on its own merits.  I saw in it good examples of performance analysis and efforts to improve performance–with relative few attempts to train people out of non-training problems.

For example, for cardiac catheterization, Hopkins had an infection rate of 11 per 1,000 procedures.  According to Pronovost, at the time that “put us in the worst 10% of the country.”

Here’s a diagram I created to illustrate some influences on performance:

And here are points that Pronovost makes:

• Hopkins developed a checklist to standardize what to do before catheterization (wash hands, clean skin with chlorhexidine, drape the patient, etc.).  To me, this is support for item 3 above.
• Supplies, which had been stored in as many as eight places, were prepped in a cath cart–with someone assigned to make sure it was stocked and handy.  Item 2, equipment and materials.
• The hospital asked nurses to remind doctors to wash their hands–and empowered nurses to stop procedures if this didn’t happen.  Item 8 (standards) and item 9 (feedback) — and, you could argue, item 7 (consequences).

Note also that the Hopkins project defined a specific problem (a high rate of infection), analyzed likely causes, chose action based on those causes, and measured the results.

Pronovost forcefully describes another barrier to performance: workplace culture:

As at many hospitals, we had dysfunctional teamwork because of an exceedingly hierarchal culture…

…in every hospital in America, patients die because of hierarchy. The way doctors are trained, the experiential domain is seen as threatening and unimportant. Yet, a nurse or a family member may be with a patient for 12 hours in a day, while a doctor might only pop in for five minutes.

I mention this not to single out doctors but to emphasize that performance problems usually have multiple causes.  Some you can address in a straightforward fashion (rethinking where to keep the supplies).  Others, you have to keep working at.  In commercial aviation, use of preflight checklists is maintained not only by regulations but by the active support of those who use them: it’s not smarter or more efficient to try memorizing the checklist.  In fact, it’s seen as counterproductive.

(Note what the Skout Group says about workplace culture–and checklists–in terms of USAir 1549, the plane that Sullenberger and Skiles managed to set down in the Hudson River last year, with no loss of life.)

Back to the hospital: isn’t there some need for training?

I couldn’t say; Pronovost’s interview doesn’t have enough detail.  It could be that some hospital staff need training in preparing for catheterization.  If that’s the case, I suspect that inside the generalization of “preparing for catheterization,” there are distinct subtasks: identify and obtain the supplies, prep yourself, prep the patient, assist (or be assisted by) a specialist, and so on.

And perhaps there’s a meta-skill: make sure the individual assigned to this task can first demonstrate an acceptable level of skill.  In other words, something like “we expect you learned this in nursing school (or wherever); here are our standards; we’ll observe you and tell you how you did.”

I don’t know that I’d put the necessary culture change under “training.” I’m pretty sure the label is less important than the goal: having doctors (most not hospital employees) and hospital staff work together to reduce the rate of preventable infection.

Word of the day: nosocomial, meaning “occurring in a hospital.” I came across it in this 2001 CDC report, The Impact of Hospital-Acquired Bloodstream Infections.  Its low estimate for life-threatening bloodstream infections acquired in the hospital is 87,500 per year.  The low estimate of deaths from these bloodstream infections: 8,750.

(And bloodstream infections are estimated at 10% of all nosocomial infection.)

This morning’s Washington Post has an article about college professors banning laptops from their classrooms.  (The first example is from a Georgetown Law lecture on “democracy and coercion.”)

Similar bans, the article claims, exist at William and Mary, the University of Virginia, and other big-name schools.

It’s been years for me since college, so my own notions are just notions.  That rarely stops me from musing.

• That law lecture occurred in a room with a hundred students.  Ipso facto, it seems to me, the average student didn’t get to say ten words.  Not that you have to say something to rework, reconsider, connect what’s new to what’s known–but talking about new material is at least as helpful as writing notes on paper.
• It’s not as if a room without laptops is a room without distractions (or a room that suddenly has interesting lecture).  As a U-Va professor says, “If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems.”
• One comment added to the Post story reminds us of all the people who doodled, crossword-puzzled, or just read the sports pages while safely and quietly lodged toward the back of the lecture hall.

I don’t mean to seem one-sided.  No matter how cool your keyboard, even ten people in a room going clickety clickety clickety can be distracting–just as Worlds of Warcraft can be when it’s on the screen of the person in front of you during Conflict in Nineteenth-Century East Asia.

Stepping completely outside things I know about: maybe the tried-and-true formal education approach isn’t always ideal.  A law professor in a lecture hall might not be so impartial about his methods as to concede their shortcomings.  Is a lecture to 100 people an optimal way to achieve whatever the goal is for “democracy and coercion?”

Maybe not–because formal systems like law school have a built-in time and exposure constraint, culminating in not just the law degree but the bar exam.

Mostly I think the question hinges on specifics: what’s the purpose of this (presumably in-person) class?  Why is it in-person?  Am I as the professor dispensing knowledge (the Font of Wisdom approach)?  Am I encouraging people to explore issues, grapple with implications, bring in things from the outside?

Consider the approach of another Georgetown law professor (who does allow laptops).  He told his class that Chief Justice John Roberts was stepping down from the Supreme Court.

That was untrue, as the professor knew–but the news flew out.  It seems the real point of the lesson was: credibility. (Much more on this story at Above the Law, including a follow-up.)

CC-licensed image of lecture notes by Kevin Lawver.

Last week, I found myself in a couple of discussions about the difference between training and learning.  I only took one philosophy course in college, and later on I hollowed out the textbook to hide a gag gift, so it’s clear I’m not that contemplative on this issue.

To oversimplify, many people in more traditional training jobs felt strongly that there is such a thing as “training” and that it has the potential for great value.  Other people, by and large on the you-manage-your-own-learning side, seemed to place little value on structured training as such.

Although I doubt most participants intended it, you could interpret the divergent views as “this is important work I’m doing that helps people become more productive” versus “get out of your rut.”

Maybe not a rut, but at least a well-worn path.  I’ve spent a lot of time in that corporate-training path: 7 years at Amtrak, 18 at GE, and much of my consultant career since.  Usually I’m far from the executive suite, so I have some sympathy for challenges that first-line and middle managers face together with their work groups.

Which is why, over and over, I recommend Robert F. Mager‘s What Every Manager Should Know about Training.  Not just to clients (though I’ve even sent the book as a gift when I thought it would be well received) but to the corporate trainers supporting them.

It’s not a scholarly book, nor a thick one; you could probably read the 140 pages in two hours. But in that space, Bob Mager works hard to get managers out of the training-as-dosage mythology.

• Rule 1: Training is appropriate only when two conditions are present:
  • There is something people don’t know how to do, and
  • They need to be able to do it.
• Rule 2: If they already know how, more training won’t help.
• Rule 3: Skill alone is not enough to guarantee performance.
• Rule 4: You can’t store training.
  • Use it or lose it.
• Rule 5: Trainers can guarantee skill, but they can’t guarantee on-the-job performance.
• Rule 6: Only managers, not trainers, can be held accountable for on-the-job performance.

Mager: “If training is only a means to an end, what is the end toward which it strives?  It’s performance.”  Someone familiar with concepts like ISPI’s human performance technology model (links to a PDF document) recognizes exactly what Mager’s doing: smuggling performance improvement into the organization.  He’s just hidden it in a plain brown wrapper that’s labeled TRAINING.

He was clever in choosing the title, because I’d argue the majority of people who supervise or manage in organizations use “training,” at least in casual conversation, to mean a whole complex of things related to getting people to produce valuable results on the job.  Instead of trying to convert them to performance-improvement or informal-learning jargon, Mager starts where these managers are likely to start.  Then he builds on their likely experience in other dimensions of work to help them see how training (as a structured approach toward helping people acquite skills they don’t have) is one part of overall performance.

In the chapter, Where the Magic Goes In, Mager addresses another concern managers have:

Instead of asking, “How long will it take to develop my course?” you might consider asking:

What can you do for me with the lead time I’ve got?…

For example, if [the training department has] only two days for training development, the most useful thing they can do is to verify whether training is a valid solution, and to verify which solutions will have the greatest impact on the problem.

If the trainers have time to do one more thing, a task analysis would be the most useful action.  These analyses can be turned into checklists in a matter of minutes, and the checklists can be given immediately to the instructors…and to the trainees, to show…what competent performers can do….

If there is time to do one more thing, trainers can derive the objectives of the instruction and then draft skill checks by which instructional success can be measured…

…Which, by the way, isn’t a bad way to think about any sort of guidance you’d like to provide other people.