Waste is difficult to eliminate or fix if you do not precisely identify what it is. When it lingers, it tends to permeate every aspect of your productivity. The Japanese, lucky for us, came up with three very specific terms for categorizing waste: muda, mura, muri.
Muda is the wasteful part of an activity within the process of producing something. This part does not add any value and can be labeled as extraneous. If this element is removed, nothing feels missing as the prudent removal could be seen as “an addition by subtraction”. For educators, it is critical that we pinpoint these unnecessary parts of our daily processes. One example that comes from my own experience involves a redundancy in my grade entry. At the beginning of my teaching career, I utilized one of those good old fashioned green grade recorder books. This was the customary means of grade entry for many of my colleagues at the Archdiocesan school at which I started. But just like the dunce cap in the closet, there was no need to maintain this paper-based grade book because each teacher was required to maintain a virtual one on GradeSaver. Instead of doing double entry and wasting hours putting things down twice for the sake of security (or God knows what!), easy screenshots or PDF/spreadsheet downloads cut out the repetition of picking up a pen to do the same thing I had been doing on the computer. Another quick example worth mentioning is the “political poison” that can seep into any working relationship. Time spent talking about others, facilitating drama, or focused on personality clashes is undoubtedly a murderous kind of muda. As one administrator once told me, “Put any and all the energy you might think to spend on silly arguments into the passionate work that goes into teaching students and doing the job you were hired to do.”
Mura is the type of waste which yields an unbalanced feeling, an uneven result, or something frustratingly inconsistent. As Sutherland has mentioned in previous chapters, getting into a diligent flow or working rhythm is critical to productivity, so anything that disrupts this could be seen as a big bunch of mura. There are innumerable examples of mura in education, and there are headaches created by both teachers and administrators alike. For teachers, being inconsistent with classroom management expectations can create a year’s worth of chaos because feelings of “unfairness” will inevitably bubble up among students when a teacher arbitrarily and unevenly applies classroom rules without an established pattern of enforcement. Administrators also falter in this regard when disciplinary procedures are not clearly outlined, procedures are not explicitly known by staff members, or the tracking of a “behavior problem child” isn’t shared.
Muri is waste which demoralizes workers by being overburdensome. When expectations are “out of whack” or the workload is too heavy, muri rears its ugly head and causes productivity to plummet. For en educator, muri is an all-too-common waste since it is so intricately linked to the dreaded “burn out”. And sometimes that burden looks like this. But muri can be fought by prioritizing and finding shortcuts. Essay assessment is perhaps the most burdening type of assessment that an English instructor must undertake, but there are ways to make it an easier and “lighter” experience. The inclusion of writers’ workshops, recorded feedback, concise rubrics, drafting/revising, and finite focus (5 strengths / 5 weaknesses) all contribute to a much happier ELA teacher, as opposed to the one who still believes it best to use a mistake slicing red pen for each grammatical miscue or a precious hour for each paper. Since there are always a million and one things on a teacher’s “to-do list,” multi-tasking must be avoided despite its temptations.
Experience helps to identify and eliminate waste hastily. Categorizing it leads to quicker solutions. And coming together to find solutions collaboratively may help teachers who flounder individually as they fail to find answers to the waste that piles up around them.
Scrum for Schools: An Educator's Scrum Experience 
