You are a teacher aiming to promote, develop, and cultivate critical thinking and questioning skills in your students. One way to achieve this aim is to employ the strategies of Taiichi Ohno, a Japanese industrial engineer who contributed to the development of the Toyota Production System. His concepts focused on achieving the highest quality and productivity while minimizing waste and maintaining the highest levels of customer service. One strategy he believed in is a process called “Zero Defects”. This means checking for errors in and reevaluating each step of a process to ensure that no mistakes are going unchecked.

This strategy of zero defects can be used to foster critical thinking and questioning skills in your students. By evaluating each step of a process and asking questions like, “what if something is wrong?” or “how could this step be improved?” your students can be encouraged to think critically about the problem at hand. Additionally, asking questions that help students identify the potential consequences of various solutions can help to test the potential alternatives for solving the problem, and ultimately lead students to make more informed decisions. By challenging them to examine their processes more closely and consider potential errors, zero defects can be an effective tool for helping students to hone their questioning and critical thinking skills.

The 5 Why’s can help students identify the underlying causes of an issue. In the text, the writer made several changes that impacted their perspective. By using the 5 Why’s, readers can explore the implications of those changes and uncover deeper motivations. This strategy can help students think critically about problems, exploring the multiple causes, perspectives, and impacts of an issue. It can also help build questioning skills, systematically uncovering the answers to “why?” multiple times to understand a problem more deeply.