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Book Review
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The Quality Professor: Implementing TQM in the Classroom
Robert Cornesky, Editor: Jennifer Lind
December 1993, Atwood Publishing, ISBN: 0912150297
 Check it out in the Emma Waters Summar Library or Buy It At 
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This book delivers what the title suggests. It applies some well-known concepts in the field of quality management to teaching in the college classroom. In the first few chapters of the book, the work of TQM scholars Philip Crosby and W. Edwards Deming is used as the foundation for the conceptual discussions of quality management and how these ideas apply to teaching. This is followed by the specific application of the Baldridge Award criteria to classroom performance. This takes you to the midpoint of the book.
The second half of the text explores the teaching applications of TQM tools and techniques such as Pareto charting, Ishikawa diagramming, quality function deployment, and statistical process control charting. The author demonstrates how these methodologies may be used to assess the classroom situation, identify problems, and evaluate implemented solutions.
Overall, the strength and weakness of Cornesky's book are two sides of the same coin. The text is short, concise, and simplistic in its presentation. In that sense, it is a useful primer that gives the uninitiated a basic understanding of the field of Total Quality Management and some appreciation of concept application to academics. However, someone familiar with the literature in TQM is likely to conclude that the book is simply stating the obvious.
In summary, while there are no really new and innovative ideas here, The Quality Professor does accomplish what it sets out to do. It shows how quality management can be taken out of the realm of industry and used as a way to manage and improve a professor's performance in the classroom.
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