Literature review on organizational development and learning

Five principles for organizational learning

The five principles for organizational learning suggests by Senge et al. (2000) can help us to have a better understanding of the organizational development and learning. The five principles are personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning and system thinking. According to the principles, the leaders should have personal visions and awareness in promoting and nourishing organizational learning. They should also act as role models and mentors for the staff, while the staff should have the same vision of the organization, can share their experience and knowledge among themselves. Moreover, they should also view goals and problems of the organization as part of the larger whole instead of isolated issues.


Fullan’s framework

According to Fullan’s framework (2001), effective leaders should have good moral purpose, can understand the change process, build good relationships and knowledge as well as make coherence. Good moral purpose can guide people to do good things which are critical to the long-term success of all organizations. It is also essential for leaders to understand the elements in the process of change, which can raise their awareness while leading the changes. They need to aware that the goal is not to innovate the most, it is not enough to have the best ideas, there may be implementation dip and resistance, there is no a checklist for doing, and re-culturing may be required.

With regard to leadership styles, Goleman (1996) has identified the six leadership styles, i.e. coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and coaching. Apart from coercive and pacesetting leaders who require compliance and set high standards for performance of followers respectively are considered to have negative influences on the organization’s performance, all other leadership styles are likely to have positive influences on its performance according to Goleman. Authoritative leaders can mobilize people toward a vision, affiliative leaders can create harmony and build emotional bonds, democratic leaders can forge consensus through participation and coaching leaders can develop people for the future.

Fullan suggests that reorganizing of structure though can make a difference, it is not the main point of achieving success. Instead, transforming the culture or re-culturing, should be the key point of leading change. Moreover, as there is no recipe for change, nor a step-by-step process, leaders need to have different strategies for different circumstances, and cannot generalize from case studies of success. In this regard, to employ different leadership strategies flexibly seems to be more practical thing for leaders to do. Fullan also considers that effective leaders should have high emotional intelligence in addition to intellectual brilliance. They should have high self-awareness, self-regulation and motivation, adequate empathy and good social skills; while the high emotional intelligence can also help them in building good relationship with the team-mates and followers.

Regarding knowledge building, sharing of knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge (i.e. skills, beliefs, and understanding), among individuals with different backgrounds, perspectives, and motivations is critical for organizational knowledge creation. Establishing knowledge sharing practices can also help in creating collaborative culture. Regarding coherence making, leaders need to be aware that when change occurs, there will be disturbances, and the differences of opinion must be reconciled. They should be able to guide people through the differences and lead the organization to shift to a new state as a result of the new interactions and ideas. Such new states represent breakthroughs in which greater coherence is achieved for substantial improvement of the organizations.


Diffusion of innovations model

For diffusion of innovations model introduced by Rogers (1995), diffusion is defined as the process by which an innovation is adopted and gains acceptance by members of a certain community. There are five categories of people in terms of their readiness to adopt new technology, namely innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. A number of factors interact to influence the diffusion of an innovation, and the major factors are the innovation itself. The diffusion of innovation model is considered to have much impact on many disciplines including instructional technology. It may help instructional technologists to explain, predict and account for the factors facilitating or impeding the utilization of a new technology. So, the more thorough understanding on the innovation process and theories, the more likely for them to prepare better and work more effectively with clients and potential adopters (Schiffman, 1991). Teachers can also raise their awareness in this aspect while designing the teaching pedagogies.


References:

Fullan, M. (2001). Leading in a Culture of Change, San Francisco, Calif., Jossey-Bass.

Fullan, M. (2001). The new meaning of educational change. London: Routledge Falmer.

Goleman, D. (2007). The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results. London: Sphere.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed). New York: Free Press.

Summary of Session 1 (Learning organization in our workplace)

Based on different people’s sharing on their experience of the learning organization in their working place, it is possible to summarize as follow:

In order to enhance the learning organization in the working place, it is necessary to reflect on the following items and see what can be done to improve.
1. Providing professional training
It is useful to offer training course to the staff/teachers in order to equip them with basic and essential skills in their working area. Beside, the course can also used to share the mission and vision of the company/ school with the staff/teachers to help them understand the background of the company/school. Also, training courses on the newly develop working skills and new trend in the industry should be held to encourage the staffs/ teachers to try new things. Lastly, company/school can also tried to organize some courses which is based on the staff/teachers’ need and interest, the company/ school can based on the feedback and comment from them to decide what kind of course can be included in the training program of staff.

2. Leaders’ characteristic
The leader’s characteristic will affect the learning organization a lot. Some of the leaders which like to dominant all the times may demanded his/her sub-ordinates to follow strict instruction and reject new ideas, this will hinders the learning of the team and also his/her sub-ordinates will become not willing to share their views and idea in improving the working efficiency. On the other hand, if the leader are able to encourage his/her sub-ordinates to discuss when problem arise, to identify the problem together and invite them in some decision making process can encourage the whole company/ school to develop a collaborative working climate and people inside should be able to learn and willing to learn more.

3. Set up and refine of the policy
When problem arise, we should identify the problem together with the staff/ teachers by discussion. And after that, it is essential to think if the solution together, and announce new policy to help to prevent the problem happened again.
In order to keep the efficiency of working, besides announcing new policy we should also refine the original policy time by time.

Even though it seems that there are different ways which can help to increase the learning inside the working place, there is a problem that will hinder the learning organization which is nowadays, teachers are too busy, it maybe a bit difficult for them to follow the suggestions above. Moreover, we have the method, we also need to have the staffs who are willing to try, in order to encourage them, I think shared vision is really important, if the staffs do have a shared vision with the company/school they are working in, then it is much easier to ask them to follow the suggestion.

Prezi: Individual and group training and learning

MITE6238 Final Session on Prezi

Chart 1 Result Comment

Regarding the leadership that reinforces learning, one of us scores extremely high, while all the other ones are in the bottom quartile. It is obviously that most of us see the leadership to be fairly poor and there can be much to be improved. It is evidently that most of us are in organizations whose leadership is rather remote, and we have little participation in the leadership role and cannot understand the actions of the leaders.

Regarding the learning process, the one scores with high in the previous component is also high, lying within the first quartile, whereas all the others are still below the median, with one exceptionally low. Again, most of them view the learning process not as favourable as it could have been, and there could be much improvement in this area.

Regarding the learning environment, the range of response is much closer. Four of the five responses within with 2^nd and 3^rd quartile, and only one is found low in the bottom quartile. Comparatively, the learning environment is better compared to the learning process. It could be because the learning process itself is dynamic and requires a lot more external conditions for it to be effective, whereas the learning environment can be more of a physical nature and with less easily interfered.

Reflection on Teacher Professional Development in Hong Kong

Staff development in schools should be in line with the school goals, which should not be restricted to the acquisition of skills and knowledge, but also professional attitudes, beliefs, values and morality. Apart from formal training courses, which include courses leading to academic and professional qualifications, short courses, workshops and seminars etc., other means of teacher professional development, like teacher appraisal, mentoring, classroom observation and sharing are also generally accepted and considered as effective ways contributing to teacher professional development.

Continuous Professional Development (CPD) in Hong Kong as a whole emphasizes on job-related training and seems to have paid less attention to professional, educational and moral development of teachers. The objectives usually focus more on organizational goals, less on personal and individual needs of teachers. Although teacher development should be in line with school goals, it is not necessary restricted to the acquisition of skill and knowledge. It is recommended that a more balanced approach with both personal and organization goals to be met, and both technical and non-technical skills, knowledge and value should be covered. Over-emphasizing organizational goals but ignoring teachers’ professional and personal needs may lead to less enthusiastic, passive and not innovative of teachers. The professional attitudes, values and moral standards, in addition to teaching skills, are all prerequisites of a good teacher. The success of a school not only depends on the teaching and administrative performance of teachers, but also teachers’ loyalty, commitment and identification with the school goals and mission. The establishment of a collaborative culture and good morale among all staff in schools are of vital importance to achieve the school goals and missions.

On the other hand, the courses led and provided by outsiders like advisors or university lecturers are also likely to be too theoretical and too general and may not meet the needs of the school. As such, a planned and balanced approach, in which there is more teacher involvement in planning staff development should be advocated. Moreover, apart from technical training, professional attitudes are also required for teaching professionalism. The all-round and multi-track continuous developmental approach is considered better cater the organization and individual needs.

To better cater the needs of teachers, more school-based teacher development programmes and activities should be planned and conducted. The most commonly conducted CPD activities are workshops and talks, day camps or outings, visits to schools in Mainland China or other countries. Other programmes like mentoring, lesson observation and study, collaborative teaching, lesson planning and preparation and parallel lessons should also be promoted.

Scenario Planning in our Organisations

Most of our group mate are working in secondary schools and it is a trend that the schools need to enroll more and more NCS students especially from Pakistan.
The scenario is talking about how to incorporate students to normal teaching environment as there is native Chinese speaking students.
Scenario 1:
What if the cultural differences between the NCS students and local students?

Scenario 2:
Schools need to allocate extra resources such as translating notices, handouts and etc.

Scenario 3:
Learning Difficulties: To elaborate that their mother language is not Chinese and it is quite hard to aware whether they have any kind of learning difficulties.

Work done by all group members: Lok, Dilys, Kyle, Cherrie, Timothy

Prezi: Scenario Planning

MITE6328: Scenario Planning on Prezi

Work done by all group members: Lok, Dilys, Kyle, Cherrie, Timothy

Prezi: Story Telling

Story Telling - MITE6328 on Prezi

Work done by all group members: Lok, Dilys, Kyle, Cherrie, Timothy

Analysis of the data gathered from the returns of our groupmates on the Combined Learning Organization Survey in the area of Concrete Learning Process

Regarding the Concrete Learning Processes and Practices in the Combined Learning Organization Survey, there are divided into 5 areas:
(1) Experimentation,
(2) Information collection,
(3) Analysis,
(4) Education and Training, and
(5) Information Transfer.

It is obviously that Kyle and my organization have relatively low result in all five areas and Dilys’s organization is the highest.

With comparing the Summarize Table which we made to compare the History, Culture, planning and staff in our own organization. I find that Kyle and my organization’s culture are similar, we both not much collaboration between departments unless an external forces by headquarters or something happened to be solved. I think this kind of culture is the main reason that tends to our low results in all five areas. Since staffs have not much chance to interact with others department, we may not see the whole views about the organization and how can we find a better way to improve the work flow or try new experiment on learning and practices? And it also tends to lack of information transfer, problem cannot be foresee.
And the information collection part is important but better not only from “external truths”, but through the approaches that have emerged from the experiences of people who have lived and breathed the complex realities and multiple perspectives that aid organizations face on a daily basis.

In my opinion, a successful organization should responsive to past errors and able to transform itself continually. So the processes and practices of learning in an organization should always be review and analysis to find a better way to motivate staff for learning. A good principle is needed to provide the context for local reinvention, inspired by experiment and analysis. And should understanding the dynamics of change and promoting a collective learning framework which staffs can constantly express their respective interests and reach consensus.

Analysis of the data gathered from the returns of our groupmates on the Combined Learning Organization Survey in the area of supportive environment

I am going to analyse the data gathered from the returns of our groupmates on the Combined Learning Organization Survey in the area of supportive environment. Our group is comprised of five members. Apart from myself, being an educational administrator in the Education Bureau, all other group members are teachers in local schools. There are 4 areas of concern regarding the supportive learning environment in the Combined Learning Organization Survey, namely -
(1) psychological safety,
(2) appreciation of differences,
(3) openness to new ideas, and
(4) time for reflection.

I can find that there is a phenomenon that Cherrie's organization gains the lowest scores in all four areas among the organizations of all our group members. Another observation is that the scores of my organization rank the first, while the scores of the organizations of Timothy and Kyle rank the second and the third respectively, in three of the above areas, which include (2) appreciation of differences, (3) openness to new ideas, and (4) time for reflection. However, the score of the organizations of Timothy and Kyle rank the first and second respectively in the aspect of (1) psychological safety, and my organization just ranks the third in this area. The scores of Lok's organization rank the fourth in the areas of (1) psychological safety, and (4) time for reflection. As ranking of Lok's organization in the areas of (2) appreciation of differences and (3) openness to new ideas cannot be shown in the summary chart (perhaps due to some unexpected factors), this analysis will not go into details on Lok's organization because of missing data.

There is another phenomenon that the scores of cherrie's organization in all of the four areas fall into the fourth quartile. On the other hand, only the scores in the area of time for reflection gained by the organizations of Timothy, Kyle and me are in the top quartile. For psychological safety, only Timothy's organization is in the second quartile, while the organization of Kyle is in the third quartile and my organization is between the third and fourth quartile. For appreciation of differences, only the organizations of Timothy and me are in the second quartile, while both the organizations of Kyle and Cherrie fall into the fourth quartiles. For openness to new ideas, the score of my organization, though the highest within our group, is only in the third quartile, while the organizations of other group members fall into the fourth quartile.

From the above observations, I find that there is a lack of supportive learning environment as a whole, in all of the above areas, in Cherrie's organization. Apart from time for reflection, which can be considered as good enough for the organizations of three of us, the learning environment of the organizations in our group in the other areas are ranging from above average to below average. Even though the learning environment of my organization seems to be most supportive, comparing with that of my groupmates, it is in the third percentile, i.e. below average, in the areas of psychological safety and openness to new ideas.

In my opinion, the above phenomenon may highly attribute to the general culture of educational organizations in Hong Kong. More specifically, teachers tend to work quite independently, with relatively high sense of professional adequacy and individualism, but not open-minded enough to accept new ideas. They may also have the psychological barrier in sharing their knowledge. Though the data in this survey may be too limited in scope to generalize anything and cannot represent the whole picture of the learning environment of educational organizations in Hong Kong, it can provide us with some indicators for reflection. It is worthwhile to carry out further investigation into the learning culture and environment of educational organizations in Hong Kong.

Summary on Our Workplace

Link to this Document

Input by all group members and compared by Lok and Timothy

Reflection on Lok's story

Thanks to Lok for sharing his unpleasant experience and feeling regarding the practice of electronic check-in every day not only for students, but also teachers. As a long-serving staff of the Education Bureau, I have not come across the same kind of experience so far. It doesn’t mean that I am not required to be punctual but our staff are expected to be self-disciplined. This self-disciplined system seems to work quite well though I realize that some people may abuse the practice. Overall speaking, the issue is minor and tolerable as a whole in my organization. The governing regulations and established office practice, together with the staff management mechanism and appraisal system, may have also played an important role.

Nevertheless, I know that some other offices require part of their their staff, mostly junior-grade staff, to sign in and mark the arrival time on a record book or file. This practice may improve the punctuality of some staff to a certain extent, but there are some loopholes and drawback. The manual system needs some kind of manual monitoring on the spot if accuracy is to be ensured. Omission and then requesting for re-entry, marking an earlier time than the actual one and other disputes are also possible. Accusing the seniors of being late themselves is another source of conflict. It is important for the seniors and supervisors to be puntual themselves and become a role model and mentor for other staff. Providing them with helpful and friendly advice from time to time and clearly telling them their expectations will definitely help. Prior to providing them the advice, building up good staff relationship seems to be a pre-requisite for a success, and the advice should always be positive and non-judgmental. Otherwise, people tend to be more defensive which affects the effectiveness of our advice and guidance to them. Back to the basic, the organization culture should be nurtured and punctuality is just a undisputed natural practice.

I am neutral to the electronic checking-in system and the main consideration is the objective to be achieved by implementing the system. If a check-in system is to be put in place, an electronic one is definitely the more powerful system. Apart from the accuracy and thus the monitoring power, the data collected can further be used for different kinds of analysis, by group as well as by individual. With a powerful system in place, the protection of personal data is another concern. The school can easily list the students and even staff breaching the rules but the feeling of those being listed should be considered and balanced. In fact, whatever the objective is, the leader of an organization should always be concerned about the feeling of the staff. Numerous studies have demonstrated that people, as human being, tend to be more motivated and perform better if they work happily, with positive reinforcement like recognition. Whereas, the unpleasant experience and feeling for teachers in Lok’s school are considered negative feedback for teachers, and I cannot find any positive reinforcement for them. Perhaps, appreciating those who are always punctual is a better way. Moreover, timetables of a school are well planned and set, I trust that it should be rare for a teacher being unpunctual as it may lead to a class being unattended, thus requiring a sudden redeployment of another teacher to take care of the class.

my story!

The staff in our organization needed to sign in and out everyday, by just writing down the time on the attendance book. Sure, you can expect that nobody would claim themselves they were late. However, the situation changed after an electronic check-in system had been installed in our work place.

The senior level of the staff claimed that the electronic check-in system is to reduce the administrative work time. However, the systems will simply and direct treat you as “lateness” after 1 minute of the official turn-up time! Moreover, The clerk posted out the record of the attendance of the staff on the notice board and the number of times of lateness are clearly shown as well.

It actually brought a trouble among staff that, the staff were stressful as their attendance record were published and the staff had a feeling that there were an offence to the professionalism. The staff were then now saying “did you check in yet?” instead of “good morning”.

It also brought a strange phenomenon that the staff rather report they had forgotten to bring the ID card instead of checking in late.

Work done by all group members: Lok, Dilys, Kyle, Cherrie, Timothy

Organisational Learning Survey

Timothy's Unit

Dilys' Unit

Kyle's Unit

Cherrie's Unit

Lok's Unit

Combined Learning Organisation Survey

Chart 1 Result Comment


Chart 2 Result Comment



Chart 3 Result Comment

Work done by all group members: Lok, Dilys, Kyle, Cherrie, Timothy

Professional Development in my Workplace

The Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) has the mission to promote excellence and innovation in teaching and learning in my organization. The CLT runs half day, full day courses for teachers and also structured programmes on a wide range of topics. These allow staff to update their skills and knowledge, try out new things and share ideas with other members of staff. Courses in different areas like Seminar on copyright in education, sharing between staffs member, IT skills courses like WebCT training, e-learning, using mobile technologies in learning & teaching and courses to improve assessment planning. Staffs are required to attend at least 40 hours lesson under courses you chosen, which you should attend the courses in your spend time.

Professional development in my organisation

The head of my organization is a very experienced educational administrator, who has the vision and mission leading for the innovative change in education. As she highly values the importance of professional development, she encouraged us to attend more professional training courses and seminars. Apart from nominating us to attend training courses and seminars, she encouraged us to share among ourselves through our informal sharing and discussions as well as conducting presentations during our internal meetings. We are also free to discuss any educational issues in the office no matter whether they are directly related to our present duties, so that we have much opportunity to share our views and knowledge. Moreover, she allocates more funding to purchase books, mainly on educational policies, educational administration and management as well as information technology in education which are relevance to our duties, in the mini-library of the office. We are encouraged to read the books and suggest more books for procurement. Out of her leadership, I can find that the learning culture of the organization is being cultivated.

Professional Development in my Workplace

As the Education Bureau is committed to assist non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students, school principal encourage teachers to attend the special training course as per the requirement of the scheme by the use of the fundings. Under this scheme, at least 3 teachers in 3 different subjects needed to attend the course last for ten days. As referring to this NCS scheme, the influence is not only on teachers alone but also school, parents and students. Students need to pay more effort on learning at school with different language and need to participate among classmates. So, the front action and encourage from teachers that has been trained will be very important to help execute the scheme smoothly. After the ten days training of particular teachers, they can share the experience in both formal staff meeting, lunch meeting and informal on talking with other teachers.

The principal also encourage more teachers to attend the course by the government funding and secondly, they know that the trend of NCS students are already increased in primary school. So, they need to well prepare teachers to face this trend.

Reference

EBD announcement

For schools

For teachers

Professional Development in Workspace

Regarding the professional development in my workshop, I will describe it from two perspectives, whole-school and panel-based.

As of the whole-school, it is a must for each school to conduct a minimum no. of professional development programme for all staff members. Surely, there is a theme for each programme, or even a central theme for all the programmes to be conducted through a particular academic year. However, in many cases, these programmes do not align with the needs of individual staff members and their effectiveness is questionable. There were cases in which these programmes are organized more successfully, usually it is when staff members have a common concern, for example, the workshop for preparing the school to face ESR (external school review). Since each staff member will be involved in ESR, and they do have an immediate concern for it, so the effectiveness is much better. Under the organizational learning framework by Newman et. al., it is more or less like staff member do not share the same vision, and so even there is much resources available and with a very detailed action plan, the effectiveness in these programmes is rather limited.

As of the panel-level, professional development involves teachers in the same subject discipline. Usually the vision is much clearer, and the collegiality is also much higher. In most cases, we will tackle issues that are more manageable, i.e. working under the available resources, and we are more aware of each other's skill. In terms of incentives, it may not be very encouraging but I think deep down each of us wants to be a better teacher, helping students learn better and ourselves to teach better. Therefore the effectiveness is much higher.

Reflection under Fullan's Framework

There are five key concepts under Fullan's Framework. I will attempt to analyse the case with respect to this framework.

1. Moral purposes
It is not clear from the discription of the case whether Mr. C has a strong sense of moral purposes as the new principal. Obviously, he wants to be a good and successful principal in the new school, and surely he must have his own vision (say in the IT aspect). However, it is not easy to judge whether he bring such a sense of moral purpose to the school and how he does it.

2. Under the change process
Since Mr. C has worked in both the EDB and a couple of schools, he should be well aware of what changes are needed and their impacts to the school. It seems that from the descriptions quite a number of changes have been introduced since his appointment, but judging from the favourable outcome mentioned, it seems that the school has adapted to the changes quite smoothly.

3. Building good relationship
This may be a strong point of Mr. C. As mentioned, he has a good networking in the HK context as well as outside HK. However, internal good relationship within the school community is also crucial.

4. Knowledge building
As a advocate of IT, I am sure that Mr. C will work very hard in building and sharing out knowledge among staff members to enhance their capacity.

5. Coherence Making
This depends how all the plans, strategies are interconnected together.

Reflection on Fullan’s framework

I tried to investigate the case by applying the Fullan 2001’s framework for leadership, The case of leading change in this case

1.      Moral purpose:  I believed that as a successful leader, Fullan (2002) suggested hat s "acting with the intention of making a positive difference in the (social) environment."Motivation may be a fundermental factor to achieve success in the change of an organization.In this case, the new principal Mr.C had strong willing to initiate the change, as he would like to improve the student intake rate, he had an intention of making a postive difference in the secondary school

2.      Understanding the change:  A succeessful leader should understand what kind of impacts or potential challenge brought from the initiaion and the process of changing. As people usually have a sense of inertia and resist to change, interestingly, it happens in the experienced staff in an organization as they believe their way is the best way to tackle any problem already. In the casem Mr.C has a strong willing to change the culture of the school . However, as the school has a relatively long history and led by the former principal for about twenty years, the school was tied with strong and long established culture.  It can be expected that Mr C, being a newcomer to the school, needs to put much extra effort if he wants to make some changes to the school culture.  Some of the teachers tended to be quite reluctant to any change. How Mr. C deal with the experienced staff and promote change here is a critical concern in the process of the change.

3.      Building good relationship : Fullan also mentioned about the importance of building a good relationship between leadsers and staffs so that the change can be promoted slowly, which repsonse the problems mention in the 2^nd point. As a succeessful leader, Mr C needs to promote an atmosphere of woring collboratively in order to let the staffs accept and support the change and at the same time to let them express their concern or worries. That’s also the reason why Fullan suggest the leader needs to cultivate a good emotional intelligence to deal with staffs in a friendly way.

4.      Knowledge building and sharing: Fullan suggest that the leaders needs to generate and incrresing knowledge inside and outside organization. The approach is constructivist approach as ideally contribution from every party member in an organization is a good approach to foster the chage. I think that it is also closely related to the point of “building good relationship” without a good relationship among colleagues and a good environment for promoting the atmosphere of sharing, knowledge could be hardly constructed in the organization and that’s quite crucial for Mr.C to promote his policy in the changing process.

5.      Coherence Making: understand and accepting diversity among people, try to assign the most suitable person to do their job will have a better result.

ref:

   Fullan, M. (2002, May). Principals as Leaders in a Culture of Change. Educational Leadership .

Reflection of Fullan's Framework

1. Moral Purpose

Moral purpose means closing the gap between high performing schools and lower performing schools; high performing and lower performing students, by raising the level of achievement of all. So, school principal needs to concern about the success of other schools in the district as he is about his own school.

For the case we shared in the previous post.

Mr. C has done well on closing the gap between district school, and even outside HK. He encourages teachers to learn the new initiatives and curriculum through interflow to the Education Bureau, inter/intra-school sharing amongst teachers, and also sharing with “super-teachers” from China. All these help bring the successful among schools.

2. Essential for leaders to understand the change process

A good leader should have positive attitude to face difficulties of trying something new and redefine resistance as a potential positive force. And never made a checklist during the process, always be complexity and flexibility.

Mr. C advocates extensive use of IT in education through intranet, internet and e-books as he considers IT a very effective tool which can facilitate learning and teaching. Although some teachers are not adopted to the changes and may cause resistance, but Mr. C have provided teachers training and equipped them with the knowledge and skills in IT in Education.

3. Building good relationships

Effective leaders constantly foster purposeful interaction and problem solving, and are wary of easy consensus. Also, emotional intelligence is a must for good leader to promote new ideas and collect feedbacks from different people.

Mr. C is a principal with good social connection and technological mind; he has initiated the use of video conferencing to conduct debates in English with a prestige school in Malaysia. So , a good relationship with staffs and even people in different area is important to progress new activities.

4. Generating and increasing knowledge inside and outside the organization

Principle must help to build up a environment that can let people easily to speak up, because people will not voluntarily share knowledge unless they feel some moral commitment to do so. Knowledge created must be shared with others, so good leaders therefore accept a degree of ambiguity but they also seek coherence.

Mr. C suggested extending the library opening time and alumni are being invited to be voluntary helpers of the library. Apart from helping in the regular book borrowing and returning matters, the helpers also play the role as tutors. This help the knowledge sharing well, and students are also welling to reflect their needs to school.

5. Coherence making values patterns worth retaining

Principals not attuned to leading in a culture of change make the mistake of seeking external innovations, and taking on too many projects. Leaders need “energy, enthusiasm and hopefulness” to help make people “feel that even difficult problems can be tackled productively”

Reflection on Fullan's framework: What can we learn from this framework? What are the implications in our workplace?

I. Moral Purpose

It is a fundamental principle that every effective leader must have his/her moral purpose and work on improving it. Moral purpose guides people to do good things and facilitates coherence making. So, prior to our initiating any change and making any proposal, we have to think about the goals and objectives clearly making sure that they are, and understood by others to be, for good purpose. However, a moral purpose in the leader's mind may not be always perceived by other people as “moral” because people may see things from different perspectives. For example, an automation to improve the efficiency may be viewed as a step to lay off the staff. Further explanation to the staff side, like “we cannot survive without the automation, any alternative suggested?", may help as this can let them have a say and get involved.

II. Understanding of the Change Process

We should also be aware that some leadership styles (such as authoritative, affiliative, democratic and coaching) are indeed beneficial to the development of an organization, but some (like coercive and pacesetting) can have negative impact on its climate and performance. So, apart from learning and adopting the effective leadership styles, we have to raise our self-awareness and evaluate ourselves from time to time in order to keep away from any negative style. To listen to others’comments with an open mind can also be very fruitful to us.

We should also understand that we need to be patient, well aware that our goal is not to innovate the most. Moreover, having good ideas are not enough, we should master the positive leadership styles. We have to appreciate that it's common to have implementation dip, and we must have the confidence and wisdom to achieve success. It is unfortunate that some good changes may have been withdrawn too early because of an implementation dip not being accepted. Therefore, it is advisable for the change leader to forewarn the stakeholders of the possible implementation dip if it is so anticipated.

As we understand that people tend to have resistance to change, we must build good relationship with them, listen to them and gain their trust. Good relationship with staff is important but it cannot be built just before considering a change. It should be built as an ongoing practice and culture, with no hidden agenda. Moreover, we should learn to lead in the culture of change for achieving success through transforming the culture of an organization. We should also understand that there is no checklist for change and no absolute leadership strategy and model of doing, we must adjust our leadership styles and strategies flexibly, which suit the situations and circumstances.

When we implement a new initiative in our organization, we need to be well aware of the process of change and adopt the effective leadership styles flexibly that most suit our organization or the ways of doing being customized for it.

III. Building good relationships

We need to build good relationship with our team-mates in order to create collaborative cultures. We must also make sure that we are focusing on the right things, otherwise the collaborative cultures may be destructive if our focus is wrong. Thus, moral purpose, good ideas, focusing on results, and obtaining the views of dissenters are essential, because they mean that the organization is focusing on the right things.

Effective leaders may not be the smartest one in IQ. In addition to intellectual brilliance, they tend to have high emotional intelligence. So, we have to train our emotional competencies in self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. We should also learn to appreciate that resistance and understand that dissent is a potential source of new ideas and breakthroughs.

As we always need to work as a team, team building is most important, which requires good relationship amongst team members. I have met some team leaders who put much effort in building good relationships with team members and successfully maintaining good team spirit, so that we could cooperate well and complete our work smoothly most of the time. I also encountered a team leader who tended to find fault with her team members and blamed them whenever her supervisor did not accept her work. The staff morale was very low and the team members did not have any confidence, even in their routine tasks, not to say when there was something new.

IV. Knowledge Building

As we know that sharing of knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge, is crucial to the development of an organization, we should initiate more sharing opportunities and create collaborative culture. In doing so, we can learn from each other and facilitate the development and improvement of the organization.

Sharing among colleagues in my organization has been increasing and the collaborative culture has also been nurturing gradually, concurrently sharing among teachers in schools, collaborate lesson planning and co-teaching as well as sharing of good practices among schools are being promoted. This is an important part of our professional development.

It is worth noticing that the advancement of information and communication technology facilitates sharing of knowledge at large. Apart from organization website and intranet, some leaders now have their personal blog for opening up their views and ideas and inviting opinions and comments.

V. Coherence Making

Bearing in mind that people have different opinions, we should allow the differences to surface, and shift them to a state of new interactions and ideas so that coherence can be well achieved. The results will not be good if there are hidden differences and some members do not work wholeheartedly towards the agreed goal.

Most team leaders in my organization are quite open, and most of us are free to express our ideas and suggestions. We can agree on the final decisions through deliberate discussions most of the time. I think the head of my section plays an important leading role by explicitly sounding out the message to all members.


Reference: FULLAN, Michael (2001). Leading in a Culture of Change. San Francisco, Calif. : Jossey-Bass.

Develop and articulate ideas for describing leading change in an organisation

A case of leading change in an aided secondary school in Hong Kong


I. Introduction

The case to be shared is an aided secondary school in Hong Kong with significant changes brought about by a new school principal, Mr C. Recently, I have conducted a small scale case study through interviews with the principal, teachers, parents, students and alumni, as well as observation in the school. The purpose of my study was to learn from Mr C and I could carry out the study smoothly as he has been my friend for many years.

II. Background of the school under study

The school is a traditional Christian aided school with about fifty years of history. The student intake has been dropping slightly and gradually during the past decade, before Mr C joined the school four years ago.


Before him, the ex-principal was promoted from a teacher of the school when he was about forty and had served in the school for more than thirty years, with about twenty years as the principal before retirement.

III. Education and Professional Background of the Principal

Mr C joined the then Education Department of Hong Kong (now the Education Bureau) in his early twenties and had served in a few sections. Apart from pursuing a Bachelor Degree and a Certificate in Education as the basic professional qualifications, he got two Master Degrees and also a Certificate in Special Education. He left the government after serving for about ten years and joined a brand new aided secondary school as a vice-principal. After five years, he joined another aided school, which was of a contracting enrolment and admitted mostly very low academic achievers, as the principal. He served in this contracting school for just two years and then joined the school under study to replace the retired ex-principal.

IV. Difficulties in leading change

Being a traditional Christian school with relatively long history and led by the former principal for about twenty years, the school was tied with strong and long established culture. It can be expected that Mr C, being a newcomer to the school, needs to put much extra effort if he wants to make some changes to the school culture. Some of the teachers tended to be quite reluctant to any change.

V. Changes in the School Landscape Brought about by the Principal

Mr C advocates change for the rapidly changing world and trusts the teachers by allowing them much freedom to tailor the curriculum, adopt new teaching pedagogy, and provide innovative suggestions and ideas on school programs and plans. Apart from encouraging teachers to pursue life-long learning, he also encourages them to learn the new initiatives and curriculum through interflow to the Education Bureau, inter/intra-school sharing amongst teachers, and also sharing with “super-teachers” from China through lesson demonstration and co-teaching.


It is worth to point out that Mr C has developed very good e-learning environment and systems for all the schools he had served, including the present one. He persistently keeps on with his principles and belief of making use of Information Technology (IT) to improve learning and teaching. In the school under study, he advocates extensive use of IT in education through intranet, internet and e-books as he considers IT a very effective tool which can facilitate learning and teaching. To further enhance the IT environment, he made a bid for the support of the School Management Committee in his first year as the school principal to acquire and allocate more resources for upgrading of the IT facilities of the school through obtaining additional funding from Quality Education Funds and donation from parents and alumni. By doing so, he has significantly raised the standard of the facilities of Multi-media Language Centre, Computer Laboratory and computer systems installed in library, etc. Most teachers are also trained and equipped with the knowledge and skills in IT in Education.


Mr C has also put much effort to provide the students with better studying environment, better access to computers and more guidance on their individual learning needs. For instance, the school library closing times have been extended from 6:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. during school days and 12:00 noon to 7:00 p.m. on Saturdays respectively, with alumni being invited to be voluntary helpers of the library. Apart from helping in the regular book borrowing and returning matters, the helpers also play the role as tutors. As a result, many students living in the vicinity of the school stay in the school library and study hard until the library closes.


Mr C believes that whole-person education of the students is most important. In the past four years, much effort was put into improving the discipline of the students. As a result, most students are well-behaved, polite, tidily and neatly dressed, and the overall image and popularity of the school have improved. This is also reflected by an increase in the number of pupils applying for Secondary One places during the Discretionary Places Admission Stage in the past three years, despite the fact that there is a general drop of Primary Six students, including in the district of the school’s location. The banding of the Secondary One intakes has also been improving, though not quite significantly yet. Moreover, there are more applications from students of other schools for transferring to the school in the past three years.


Another important factor attributing to the effectiveness of the school should rest on the students’ learning process, which can be reflected by their learning outcome. It is noted that the academic results of the students, in terms of the passing rate in the public examinations and the percentage of students being admitted to the universities, have increased drastically.

Moreover, every student is provided with a lot of opportunities to develop their talents, e.g. in sport, dancing, singing, drama, speech and debate. Apart from providing students with adequate opportunities to participate in various local competitions and performance, e.g. Speech and Mathematics competitions, being a principal with good social connection and technological mind, he has initiated the use of video conferencing to conduct debates in English with a prestige school in Malaysia since he joined the school four years ago. To the students and teachers, it is encouraging that it won the debates in the past three years.

Model of Change

What does the model tell us?

In this model theory,it raised many concerns of diffusion of innovations that includes the change of people, company strategies and implementation plan. Yes, the most difficult thing is not the innovation plan but people who need to be changed under the change. As from the model of Roger, he stated that
"A broad social psychological theory - Diffusion of Innovations Theory describes the patterns of adoption, explains the mechanism, and assist in predicting whether and how a new invention will be successful."

The above image tells us that distribution of categories that people belongs to and shown that few people are innovators.

Can we use this model of change in our organisations and its implication?
The model can be applied in not only commercial organisations but also in schools. Less people belongs to innovators and staff mindset are difficult to change because of their resistant to new thing. So that a strong innovative leader is important to successful change. From the SITES database of HKU, it collected the world wide innovative cases and has been assessed how innovative they are. From those reports, if a school has a Innovative leader, he will bring the school to both right direction and motivation to success.

Identify a model of change to help explain change within an organisation you have experienced

In my experience, I have help several commercial companies to implement a new tool for traditional process and experienced people. First of all, the organisation leader think that the new tool is very good and can increase the productivity as well as minimize errors and most important thing is reduction of budget. However, the experienced staff tends to use traditional method with traditional tool to do the same work that means they resist to change. So that my role is that third person that help the organisation to draft the implementation plan and during the training of new tool to experienced staff to illustrate the goodness of new tool to them for helping change of their mindset. The organisation leader also known that they need to find innovative leader among staff who accept new ideas, new approach and play positive role on these change. Time being spent for several years, they now gradually see the effect of applying new tool.

Reference:

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations. (Fifth Edition). New York: Free Press.

Identify a model of change to help explain change within an organization I have experienced

Factors affecting the likelihood that a particular innovation will be adopted

1. Innovation attributes
Rogers (1995) argues that there are five attributes of an innovation which influence its rate of adoption: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability and observability.

2. Adopter characteristics
Adopters can be categorised according to their tendencies to adopt – innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards (Rogers, 1983). Each group is ideally targeted with a different diffusion strategy (Green and Johnson, 1996).

3. Environmental/ context characteristics
Low environmental uncertainty increases the tendency of organisations to remain stable or to avoid change (O'Neill, et al., 1998).

4. The characteristics of those promoting the innovation
Opinion leaders are especially important for interpersonal networks whose members differ in many respects (Rogers, 1983; Kautz and Larsen, 2000).

5. Communication channels
Mass media communication channels are more effective when there are large numbers of potential adopters and low levels of complexity, and when the goal is awareness raising (Rogers, 1995).


Can we use this model of change in our organizations and how to implicate?

The model of change can be use in school environment, as characteristics and ability of teachers and students are different. They can classify to be innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. I think the most important role is the opinion leaders role, how to diffuse the new ideas to staffs and make them respect and follow it. The opinion leaders should be promoting the ideas and listen adopters’ needs and problems.


Change within an organization I have experienced

The school hopes to promote self-learning to the students, by introduce the online platform WebCT, they hope students can prepare and study the materials before and after class. But the problem is that most of the teachers are not familiar with the new system and some are refuse to use a new method to teach students, since they don’t want to use extra time to learn it. At last, quite a little number of students can use the WebCT platform since teachers haven’t introduce and demonstrate to them.

After a review in a meeting, some IT teachers suggest opening some training courses to other non-IT background teachers, the situation have improved and more teachers willing to use the new system since they have proper training and real practice to the system, and they see the improvement of the students’ self-learning practices.

What does the diffusion of innovations model tell us? Can we use this model of change in our organisations?

What does the diffusion of innovations model tell us?

Diffusion is defined as the process by which an innovation is adopted and gains acceptance by members of a certain community. A number of factors interact to influence the diffusion of an innovation, and the major factors are the innovation itself, how information about the innovation is communicated, time, and the nature of the social system into which the innovation is being introduced (Rogers, 1995). The diffusion of innovation model has significant impact on many disciplines, such as agriculture, marketing and instructional technology. It can help instructional technologists to explain, predict and account for the factors facilitating or impeding the utilization of a new technology. The more thorough understanding on the innovation process and theories, the more likely for an instructional technologist to prepare better and work more effectively with clients and potential adopters (Schiffman, 1991).


Can we use this model of change in our organisations? Consider implications and identify a model of change to help explain change within an organisation you have experienced.

This model of change can illustrate the most common or general pattern of change in most organisations, though there may still have some exceptions. Generally speaking, I consider that it can apply to my organization, a major role of which is to encourage schools to use the information system for handling school administrative matters. The model makes us more aware of the process of change, and better prepared for working with the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, late adopters and laggards in schools more effectively.

We should always bear in mind that any change in an organization involves people, and the attempt to change people’s mindset is much more difficult than technical changes. However, we still have to be aware that technical changes may work well only when people make them well. So, we need to identify the opinion leader and change agent in the organization, say the principal and teacher(s) who supported more extensive use of information management tools in school administration. We tend to adopt the approach of training the leaders and trainers, aiming that they can promote the practices in their schools, as well as share them with other schools.

The model

 what does the model tell us?

• The no. of innovators in an organization is very limited. Be a leader of the change requires a lot of preparation 
• We need to have some strategies to push or motivate the leggards or the late majority in order to make the change succeed.
• In realistic, the actual distribution of the 4 types of people may vary, but it actually define the change difficulties and effectiveness somehow (let say, if the organization have more early majority , the change may be promote easier than the organizations which have more late majority)
• The role of change agents are important in this model, as their feedback and and stands really affect the sucess of the change.
• The opinion leaders should be outspoken, their casual remarks may induce innovators to  initiate change.

Can we use this model of change in our organizations?

• We believed that this model is quite fit for the school environment. We can classify the staffs in the school into the different roles  in the roles of innovation.

implications

• As this model involve quite a number of roles. There are many factors or hidden agende which affect the success of the change. On the other hand, the sustainability and transferability are also the key concerns of the change, as Change involves people.

Case:

In my school, I had a very enthausiatic teacher in IT.  He wanted to implement IT in our school in a large-scale.  But he was facing much resistance from teachers, as they were not prepared for it.  But then, there was the IT policy imposed by the government, which required all teachers to demonstrate IT competence.  This can be considered as a change agent, and that teacher made use of such opportunity to induce the IT culture in the school, and equipped our staff member with good IT skills and vision of IT as well.

Report on your present or previous experiences in the workplace

I have been working under VTC for 2 years. In my organization, there have are independent department called “Centre for Learning and Teaching”. This centre provide different training program for teacher and others staff in different departments. For example, new teaching staffs need to attend a 24- hour programme call “The introduction to Teaching Programme” which equips the teaching and instructing staff with basic and essential skills in teaching. Lesson included provide new teachers an overview of organization’s provisions and curriculum design in relation to organization’s mission and vision.

Besides, the centre also provide different kind of courses depend on staff’s needs. Like “workshop on school conflict Management” and “Basic skills in using WebCT”.

They are willing to take feedback from staffs and try to provide suitable courses depend on staff comments.

how my school learn

I am working in an aided primary school which transformed from a traditional primary school to a pilot school which mainly enrols students from south asia since 2003, the big change of the source of students impact the school totally. It brought lots of problems to the administrative procedure in the school due to the cultural difference.

I would describe my organization is learnt from mistakes and errors and followed by a series of guidelines. When the school encountered a problem, the principal and senior teachers tried to discuss and find out where the problems occurred, then they tried to solve it and prevented it happen again by announcing new policies to let staff and parents to follow in order to maintain the efficiency of the working force and reduce the conflicts between the school and parents. On the other hand, the school try to improve efficiency by refining those policy or guidelines from time to time .

Report on your present or previous experiences in the workplace. How best would you describe how your organisation learnt?

I have been working in the Education Bureau for a couple of years, and have been posted to different sections. From my experience, the learning cultures and patterns can vary significantly from section to section even though they are all within the same bureau. I am going to report on the experiences in two of them, “X section” and “Y section”.

The head of X section was a dominant leader who demanded his sub-ordinates to follow many strict instructions and used to reject most new ideas suggested by his subordinates. It seemed that he seldom considered them seriously. He might criticized them openly and regarded them as “stupid” and “silly” ones. Some of us might have quite a lot of unpleasant experiences of being banned and rejected upon expressing our views. Therefore, most of us were reluctant to make any comments and suggestions gradually, even though we had some views or suggestions on better handling of certain cases or improving our working procedures. Under the above mentioned supervision, X section tended to learn very slowly or even could not “grow”.

On the contrary, the head of Y section was a democratic leader, who highly encouraged us to participate in decision making. He also greatly treasured the importance of our continuous professional development. Apart from nominating us to attend training courses and seminars, he encouraged us to share among ourselves. We were free to discuss any educational issues in the office no matter whether they were directly related to our present duties. We were also encouraged to share our views and knowledge in informal discussions and also in the formal meetings. Moreover, he supported us to work out of the office and to liaise with schools closely for better understanding the “real pictures” and needs of schools for improvement of our services and support to schools. Out of his leadership, I could see the improvement and growth of myself and our section. The learning culture of Y section was indeed nourished.

My experience in learning organization in my workplace

According to Senge's Schools that Learn, the five principles for learning organizations are

1. Personal mastery
2. Mental models
3. Shared visions
4. Team learning
5. Systems thinking

I will share my experience with my workplace with regard to these five principles.

1. Personal mastery

I would say that as a teacher, each of us do possess the basic subject and pedagogical knowlege to be a teacher. But in the ever changing world nowadays, all these tacit knowledge is no longer sufficient. It is more important to adopt an attitude to be a life-long learner to suit the needs of the world.

2. Mental models and shared vision

Both mental models and shared vision will be extremely useful to guide us for the direction ahead. Schools with regligious background will have strong characteristics of these. Unfortunately, from my experience, the work of a teacher is too much and we seldom have time nor opportunity to really take the time off to formulate shared vision among staff members. It is mostly the case that we have to follow what is decided by the administration and implement without going into the details of why or how these are being formulated.

3. Team learning

The most obvious experience is the staff development programme for schools. However, the effectiveness of these is questionable, mostly due to the vast variety of needs of various staff members. Should there be a common goal to align the learning, the effectiveness can be much enhanced.

4. Systems thinking

Usually the big picture is left for the administration to worry about, a teacher can only deal with his/her own responsibility most of the time.

Learning Organisation in the Workplace

My Experience in organisation learning involve several companies and schools.
From starting of my educational experience, I was firstly introducing and training on construction software to various companies and government departments. For this training experience, it needed to handle different issues from different organisation and that why I think this course is vital to me. Actually, the training offered by my company is to introduce newly software skills and sharing the new trend of the industry. It is difficult to change people's mindset that they worked for this field for many years and so "Change" concept is vital in my training and "care for old" as well as "courage for new" is what I had done. For introducing the new technology, I previously wrote blogs as well.

So, as also an internal trainer, I also shared my training experience to my colleagues and we will attend regular update training from software developer and we will also get latest technology from internal web resources all around the world.

For experience in teaching in traditional secondary school, there are regular "teacher training day" and regular meeting among colleagues even general talks in sharing experience and methods on how to tackle students disciplinary issues.

First Post

Hi All.