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.