Thursday, January 27, 2011

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.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

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.