Eliminating Waste In Teaching: Timeless Lessons for Improving Teaching and Training

Eliminating Waste in Teaching revives a remarkable lost work: Lillian Moller Gilbreth's unpublished 1915 doctoral dissertation, brought back into print by with new framing for today's readers. Its central insight is startling and practical: the same waste elimination methods that transformed factories a century ago can dramatically improve how we teach and train, and the teaching problems Gilbreth diagnosed in 1915 are still with us. This book helps teachers, trainers, and administrators see instruction as a process that can be observed, measured, and continuously improved.

This book helps readers by:

Part I — General Principles of Waste Elimination

• Reframing Teaching as Waste Elimination. It establishes that "cutting out needless time, money, material, or effort" applies to the classroom as much as the factory, giving educators a concrete definition of waste to work against.
• Connecting Education to Scientific Management. It shows why the systematic, evidence-based thinking behind industrial improvement belongs in schools, bridging two worlds that rarely communicate to each other.
• Clarifying What Scientific Management Actually Is. It dispels caricatures of "efficiency" and explains the method's real substance, grounded in observation, measurement, and respect for the human element.
• Making The Method Testable and Practical. It lays out how scientific management is practiced and how to tell whether it's genuinely working, so readers can judge results rather than take claims on faith.
• Showing How to “Install” and Sustain It. It addresses the hardest part, making improvement stick rather than reverting to old habits, with guidance on maintaining new practices over time.

Part II — Application of Waste Elimination to Teaching

• Starting With an Honest Survey. It insists on recording present teaching practice in writing before changing anything, because we rarely know our own work as well as we think we do.
• Eliminating Waste In the Material Element. It examines the tools, texts, and physical conditions of instruction, targeting the wasted resources and effort hidden in everyday classroom setup.
• Reducing Waste In Physical Motions. It applies motion study to the bodily work of teaching and learning, removing needless effort that tires teachers and students alike.
• Reducing Waste In Mental Motions. It turns the same lens on cognitive effort – how material is presented and absorbed – to cut confusion and wasted mental work.
• Solving The Problem of Motivation. It explores the incentives, "social spirit," and pride in work that leads students and workers to do their best willingly, arguing that true efficiency cannot depend on a charismatic individual.

Wrapped in Emiliani's preface, foreword, introduction, and a closing look at contemporary waste-elimination methods, this is both a work of history and a working manual. For teachers, trainers, and education leaders who suspect that much of what frustrates learners is avoidable, and for anyone curious why they disliked school, it offers a century-tested, refreshingly practical path to teaching better.