Thursday, February 24, 2011

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.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

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

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.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

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.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

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 2nd 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.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

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.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

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.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

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.