School development as development of organizational learning and change: A systemic approach

Author(s):

Exakousti-Petroula Angelakou(presenting / submitting)Anastasios Kodakos Evangelia Oikonomidi

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

32. Organizational Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

32 SES 02, Organizational Learning: A central topic of Organizational Education

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

15:15-16:45

Room:

K3.18

Chair:

Andreas Schröer

Contribution

In the current season of complexity, the most rapid developmental rhythms, the extension of the new technological environment, the multiculturalism and the rapid increase in the available information and knowledge led to the development of sciences and the transformation of the social structures, giving a new dimension in the requirements for learning and education, making the educational changes essential for the effectiveness of school.

Educational changes have always been a result and indication of social transformations, provided that the educational system is structurally connected with the all the other surrounding social systems. Consequently, an educational organism conforms to the wider social change and develops adaptive mechanisms, in order to survive in the rapidly changing environment in a process of evolution and simultaneous development. Schools correspond to this challenge reinforcing their ability for organizational learning. This contributes to school improvement and effectiveness as a basic presupposition, as organizational learning encourages the development in all levels of the school (individual, collective and organizational level). The conflation of these levels turns school into a learning one.

It is an undeniable fact that, in Greece, the educational reformations take place either based on European requirements, without having been adapted to the Greek reality, or as an expression of a certain educational policy of the political party being in power. The particularity of the Greek educational reality brings the discussion about the policy of educational reforms in front of a basic question: Can we distinguish some certain dominant tendencies/ perceptions which characterize, to an extent, the procedure of change of the Greek educational system? In Greece, researches and studies have proved that the educational system is centralist and most changes continue to be made by the central bodies or institutions without the opinion of the directly involved in the educational process being taken into consideration. In other words, the educational reforms are attempted in a systemically-organizationally incoherent way. This is justified as there are incompatibility and inconherence in the planning and application of educational changes and reforms, while the systemic autonomy of schools as well as their structural connection with the important surrounding systems, eg. the family, are overlooked.

The educational change itself is an auto-referential and complicated procedure. This means that schools have to manage the demanding environments of multiple innovations/changes and coordinate them, introducing many changes in order to acquire their own distinguishable identity but at the same time selective communication with the other systems surrounding them. Taking for granted that each school constitutes a learning organism, which can evolve from a fragmented sum into an autonomous, auto-referential and autopoetic system through procedures of organizational learning, the present research constitutes an effort to investigate the levels of organizational learning in relation with the changes in Greek school units of secondary education.

Method

This paper constitutes an effort to detect the levels of Organizational Learning in educational organisms of secondary education, in Athens. Through the intensive study of international bibliography, a typology of school was defined as a learning organism on the basis of which a questionnaire was conducted, the questions of which were related with the organizational culture and derived from the series of questions Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (Marsick & Watkins, 2003), the inquiring tool of C. Johnston and B. Caldwell (2001). It is about a tool that was used in order to evaluate how much a Greek school presents characteristics of a learning organism. The content of the questionnaire consisted of two thematic units. The first unit included questions that referred to the demographic characteristics of the participants (gender, work relation, years of total educational service, titles of study, years of service in the school unit in which they served during the conduct of research), while the second unit referred to the detection/measurement of the level of development of organizational learning/intelligence of schools where the participants were employed, in order to detect the extent to which schools develop the organizational learning as an essential condition of introduction of changes. The present paper concludes with proposals for the reinforcement of organizational learning structures to school organisms, as well as with proposals for further practical research.

Expected Outcomes

The traditional mechanistic perception of school is unable to correspond to the modern social reality and manage the complexity of school organisms. The school faces problems of inefficiency, which are attributed to the fact that, even today, its operation continues to be determined by a rather traditional perception, thus, the reforming and modernizing efforts are condemned to fail. In Greece, in conditions of high complexity as well as crisis, an attempt to modernise the educational system is made, in order to correspond to the new developments, the social challenges and the qualitative requirements at a higher speed and flexibility. In order to achieve this, each school is enforced to provide margins of structure, organization and action that can be used independently in order to cope with the environmental systems via its organizational development in a corresponding way. As it can be assumed by the research, schools cannot cope in the same way, exactly because differences are detected in the way they encourage and support organizational learning through, e.g. the collaborative practices. Various factors act supportively or restrictively in the levels of organizational learning of schools, with their administration-management being of the most basic factors. The results of research reveal that the administration of a school often prevents problems of communication and negative situations, yet does not always provide long-term solutions to the problems emerging. As a result, most Greek schools participate in learning procedures, thus, they are more involved in procedures of single loop learning than those of productive ones. School organisms, as organisms that aim at the learning, can be regarded as learning ones and constitute role models for other organisms. For this reason, the cooperation of the educational, pedagogical and administrative school operation in a model of its development as an intelligent and learning organism are highly recommended.

References

Adelman, H. S., & Taylor, L. (2007). Systemic Change for School Improvement. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 17(1), 55–77. Argote, L., & Miron-Spektor, E. (2001). «Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge». Organization Science, 23 March 2011. (pp. 1123 – 1137). Bouvier, A. (2013). Management and cognitive sciences. Book series: A. Kodakos & Fr. Kalavasis (Ed.), Topic of Educational Design. Athens: Diadrassi. Coppieters, P. (2005). «Turning schools into learning organizations». European Journal of Teacher Education, 28(2), 129-139. Fauske, J.R., & Raybould, R. (2005). «Organizational learning theory in schools». Journal of Educational Administration, 43(1), 22-40. Hanson, D. (2001). Institutional Theory and Educational Change. Educational Administration Quarterly, 37I(5). (pp. 637-661). Hargreaves, A. (2002). «Sustainability of Educational Change: The Role of Social Geographies». Journal of Educational Change 3, p. 189–214. Hopkins, D., Stringfield, S., Harris, A., Stoll, L., & Mackay, T. (2014). «School and system improvement: A narrative state-of-the-art review». School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(2), 257-281. Retrieved November 22, 2014. Huysman, M. (2000). An Organizational Learning Approach to the Learning Organization. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 9(2), 133-145. Johnston, C., & Caldwell, B. (2001). Leadership and organisational learning in the quest for world class schools. International Journal of Educational Management,15(2), 94-103. Watkins, Karen E. & Marsick, Victoria J. (Eds.), (May 2003). “Making Learning Count! Diagnosing the Learning Culture in Organizations”, Advances in Developing Human Resources, Vol. 5, No.2. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage.

Author Information

Exakousti-Petroula Angelakou (presenting / submitting)

University of the Aegean

Rhodes

Anastasios Kodakos

University of the Aegean, Greece

Evangelia Oikonomidi

Secondary education

Athens

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.