What if more quizzes created more joy—not stress?
Lee Jenkins shows host Andrew Stotz how Deming-inspired practices like random-concept quizzes, student-led charts, and "all-time best" celebrations turn classrooms into true learning systems that build confidence, motivation, and real understanding. A simple shift in method—massive shift in joy. (View the powerpoint referenced in the podcast.)

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02 .2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm talking with Lee Jenkins, who is a career educator in public schools, completing his full-time work as a school district superintendent. During that work, he was introduced to the teachings of Dr. Deming and has been applying those teachings to his life and work since. In his business, Crazy Simple Education, he helps people apply Dr. Deming's principles in their schools to bring joy back to learning, to help kids learn more. The topic for today is how educators have applied Dr. Deming's ideas to learning. Lee, take it away.

 

0:00:42 .8 Lee Jenkins: Thank you so much, Andrew. It's amazing what Dr. Deming taught in five minutes. I've been able to teach that for over 20 years. It's just amazing. And then you see in the next slide, it was Lou Rhodes. And this is just a short little review of what we did on the first podcast. But he's the one that said, I think you're going to enjoy this. Little did he know how much I was going to enjoy that in 1990 when he said that. And then in 1992, heard Dr. Deming in person as the statistician. And he described in five minutes just a little touch of what was different about a classroom as opposed to all the other systems that he was teaching. And so over time, you're going to see how it's been implemented with great joy with so many people. He taught that education should have a learning system instead of an inspection system. And that's what we have, is an inspection system. The state departments of education inspect the schools and the teachers inspect the kids. We don't have a learning system. So if you think about that distinction, it's truly a learning system. And you're going to see that as we go through this today.

 

0:01:51 .2 Andrew Stotz: Lee, I was just... After listening to you in the last episode and listening to some of our other great guests on the show, I talked to my students about this. And one of my students, after I went through it and talked about the random sampling as an example of questions to understand the level of knowledge that students as a group are getting, one of my students at this prestigious university I teach at in Thailand said, "So why are you grading us? "

 

0:02:26 .1 Lee Jenkins: Yes. Yes. That's it.

 

0:02:27 .4 Andrew Stotz: And I said... Lee, I need help. I gave my best answer and that is, "I decided that right now, the fight with the university to change the way it's done is not a fight I'm prepared to take. But what I'm going to do is try to deliver the best experience I can in the room." Now, that was a bit of a cop out, but that's part of... People who are listening and viewing this are also caught in a system, in a trap, an inspection system. So it's just great to hear you talk about this and it can help us think about how we can handle it.

 

0:03:09 .9 Lee Jenkins: People say that education hasn't been improved for 50 years. Then think about it. We've had an inspection system for 50 years. Maybe that's the problem, right? So here's what Dr. Deming taught. Tell them what you want them to know first week of school. Here it is. You're going to give them a weekly quiz. The quiz is going to be the square root of the total number of concepts you want them to learn. So a teacher teaching a second language, 400 vocabulary words, they had 20 words a week at random out of the 400. It's simple, but it's crazy that you don't... People say, "How can you assess them on something you haven't taught yet? " You can, if you have a learning system. And then he said to build a scatter diagram and a class run chart. And let's look at those two just to review. The scatter diagram, and if you can't see this, it's just across the x-axis on the bottom. It says 1 to 14, which is for half a year. The y-axis goes from 0 to 10 because there are 10 questions every week in this classroom. And we have a dot by how many kids got 0 right, how many kids got 1 right, how many kids got 2 right. And if you look at over a semester, you can see all the dots moving from the lower left corner up to the upper right corner. So that's the scatter diagram.

 

0:04:29 .7 Andrew Stotz: That's all the students in the class. That's not one individual student.

 

0:04:33 .0 Lee Jenkins: That's not one student. It's the whole class because you're the manager of the learning of a classroom. He taught that. And then he said graph the total correct for the whole classroom.

 

0:04:46 .6 Andrew Stotz: So you just did what he said.

 

0:04:49 .8 Lee Jenkins: Yeah, add it up. It is simple and it is crazy. I mean, all the coaches who are listening to this know when you go to a game, you add up the total for every athlete. You add it up to get a total for the team. Then that same coach is in the classroom on Monday and they never think about that this is a team of learners. It's the same thing. Add it up. And they love it. And they help each other and they contribute and they celebrate when a struggling student helps the class out as much as a student that's advanced.

 

0:05:24 .2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I mean we're social creatures, right? We want to be part of a group. We want to contribute. It's just such a clear principle.

 

0:05:35 .0 Lee Jenkins: Yeah, it's simple. So then here's the expansion. Here's different things that happened over time with the process, and we'll share those with you. One was people said, well, ya know, my problem is not... It's partly they don't remember what I'm teaching well enough, but they clearly don't remember the prior courses. So this is a high school math teacher teaching geometry, and so she has half of her questions are coming from geometry because they're teaching geometry. But the other half of the questions come from the four courses they had in math prior because she knows they don't remember it. And then there's a secondary science department. The same thing. They said half of our questions for every quiz have to be from the prior courses, not just the current one. Because students think...

 

0:06:29 .6 Andrew Stotz: Wow! That's fascinating. And before you go for that, so let's look at geometry. You've got these buckets. Before geometry is algebra two, and before that is algebra one, and before that's pre-algebra, and before that is math seven. I remember my pre-algebra class at school with Dr...Mr. Tyler. He was the football coach, and that guy was a slave driver. Even if you got the question wrong, if you structured your answering process right, you would get half points.

 

0:06:58 .9 Lee Jenkins: Oh, okay. Yes.

 

0:06:59 .6 Andrew Stotz: He helped me learn the structure and the order of solving algebra problems, but if I didn't do that well or I didn't have him as a teacher, I could end up in geometry not actually knowing that. But what the heck is this geometry teacher supposed to do if they find out that the class doesn't really understand some of the prior core principles?

 

0:07:21 .7 Lee Jenkins: Well, they, obviously, they need to teach it, and so part of it they do. The other part of it is the kids don't want to forget the prior courses. If you just throw all these into a bucket and they don't say where it's from, they don't... Well, okay, I missed a question. But when you say, you're in 11th grade in geometry, and you missed the 7th grade question, they don't like that. So it builds, it's a visual. It's right in front of the room every day. They can see, I need to know all of this. And the science teacher is the same thing. The kids say, I'm in chemistry now. I don't need biology. Why do I need that? Until you see it right there in front of you every day, and you think, oh, I'm supposed to learn this.

 

0:08:12 .9 Andrew Stotz: Gosh, it just brings me back to when I was in high school, and I really got frustrated because the pace was really fast, and I felt like I didn't fully understand the prior material, and now I'm on to the next. And that was, and I felt like I was building on a shaky foundatio