Renowned author, Mike Rother, will visit Northwest PA in December to present Kata in the Classroom (KiC) to educators, a program he created to teach a pattern of scientific thinking. “Scientific thinking is a life skill. It’s the basis for creativity and successfully pursuing seemingly unattainable goals. The KiC exercise makes it a teachable skill that anyone can learn — by combining a simple scientific striving pattern with practice routines called Kata — and helps you teach meta-cognitive strategies,” says Rother and is also the focus on his website, www.katatogrow.com.
During programs on December 6 (Meadville) and December 7 (Erie), Rother will demonstrate the KiC exercise—with educators as the participants—so they learn to run it with their own classroom or group. Students can apply this skill pattern to many different activities in the classroom, at home, at work, and in life. The program is not only geared for K-12 Educators, but also administrators and anyone who coaches and mentors students in the STEM skills. The program will provide a simulation of the four‐step Improvement Kata scientific thinking pattern that can be used with activities and projects during the school year. As an example, the Improvement Kata has been used in training students on Robotics Teams and Lego Leagues. “Learning this skill is beneficial for everyone to successfully navigate the unpredictable landscape between us and our goals,” said Rother.
Rother is an engineer, a researcher, teacher and speaker on the subjects of management, leadership, improvement, adaptiveness, and change in human organizations. He has been a member of the Industrial Technology Institute (Ann Arbor), the University of Michigan College of Engineering, the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (Stuttgart), and the Technical University Dortmund. He’s the author of several books, including Learning to See and Toyota Kata, and creator of Kata in the Classroom.
While in our region, Rother will present his Kata in the Classroom in Meadville on December 6th and Erie on December 7th. (Click the locations for details and to register for this free program).