Lean Teaching: A Guide to Becoming a Better Teacher
Lean Teaching applies the principles and practices of Lean management - the same methods that transform factories and offices - to the design and delivery of university courses. Drawing on 16 years as a professor and a prior industry career trained by Shingijutsu sensei. The book shows how teaching is a process like any other: It can be observed, improved, and made dramatically better for students and professors alike. Crucially, the book is about "Lean teaching" - applying Lean to teaching - not "teaching Lean," and it treats even skilled, experienced faculty as capable of continuously improving their teaching.
This book helps readers by:
Correcting What Faculty Get Wrong About Lean. Explains what Lean management actually is, a human-centered system built on "Continuous Improvement" and "Respect for People," powered by supra-critical thinking, and dispelling the myth that it's "just a manufacturing thing" with no place in the classroom.
Naming the Errors Teachers Don't See. Catalogs dozens of common "unforced errors" that quietly erode student learning, giving faculty an honest, specific mirror to learn from and treating teaching as a professional skill to be practiced and refined.
Redesigning Courses as a Process. Provides examples of real improvements to syllabus, readings, assignments, exams, homework, and delivery, showing how to rebuild a course for consistency, engagement, and student value.
Proving Improvement with Real Assessment. Shows how to measure whether changes actually work, replacing guesswork and end-of-term ritual with meaningful outcomes data.
Going Deeper with Advanced Improvements. Extends the redesign with further, more sophisticated teaching-process improvements drawn from years of classroom experimentation.
Closing The Loop with More Evidence. Outcomes assessment, demonstrating the compounding gains in engagement and learning that come from sustained, iterative improvement.
Turning Reflection into a Teaching Practice. Pulls the lessons together and encourages faculty to adopt continuous improvement as a permanent habit, supported by appendices that address faculty concerns about students as " customers," a Q&A, and teaching-survey findings.
Practical, candid, and grounded in a professor's real-world experiments, this is a rare bridge between industrial improvement and the classroom. For faculty, department chairs, deans, and university leaders who suspect that "we've always taught it this way" is failing students, Lean Teaching offers both a mindset shift and a concrete method for becoming measurably better.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
