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.

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.

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.