Organizational Learning in Schools

Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis, Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000142587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Civil Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This volume presents the view that what matters most are learning processes in organizations and ways of enhancing the sophistication and power of these processes. Each contributor, therefore, explicitly addresses the meaning(s) of organizational learning which they have adopted themselves.

1Organizational Learning in Schools: An Introduction

DOI: 10.1201/9781003077459-1

Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore Louis

Organizational learning is changed organization capacity for doing something new. (Watkins & Marsick, 1993, p. 148)

In her 1996 address to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Linda Darling-Hammond (1996) argued that, in order for all children to learn, we:

need to understand how to teach in ways that respond to students’ diverse approaches to learning, that are structured to take advantage of students’ unique starting points, and that carefully scaffold work aimed at more proficient performances. (p. 7)

The aim of such “adaptive education” is to give “students access to social understanding … by talking and making decisions with one another and coming to understand multiple perspectives” (p. 6). Additionally, and a crucial part of Darling-Hammond’s position for purposes of this book, she also argued that we must “understand what schools must do to organize themselves to support such teaching and learning” (p. 7). Darling-Hammond is not the first to suggest that educational restructuring and reform should be undertaken from the bottom up or that the design of schools should focus around the students’ experience. But, in order to do this, Darling-Hammond also explicitly called for schools to become “learning organizations.” What does this mean and why should that be advocated as an image of future schools?

Organizational learning in schools

Organizations continuously accumulate experiences that either reinforce or change their behavior. What is being learned, however, may be useful or dangerous, mundane or insightful, may lead to change or provide ways of avoiding change. When the term “learning organization” is used it usually implies the most desirable of each of these pairs of alternatives associated with learning. As a number of authors have noted, organizational learning is not the same as problem-solving or decision-making: productive group learning often occurs in situations where addressing a specific need is not the focus of attention. Nor do we believe that there is a simple way of distinguishing between schools that are “learning organizations” and those that are not. However, most writers on the topic define it as:

A group of people pursuing common purposes (and individual purposes as well) with a collective commitment to regularly weighing the value of those purposes, modifying them when that makes sense, and continuously developing more effective and efficient ways of accomplishing those purposes. (Leithwood & Aitken, 1995, p. 41)

In this book, therefore, we take the position that what matters most are learning processes in organizations and ways of enhancing the sophistication and power of these processes.

The authors of the chapters in this book each explicitly address the meaning(s) of organizational learning which they adopted for their own purposes. Given such attention throughout the book, suffice it to say, by way of introduction, our meaning of this term includes all of the following:

• the learning of individuals in organizational contexts, represented in the work of Brown and Duguid (1996) on learning in “communities of practice” for example
• the learning that occurs in small groups or teams as, for example, described in Hutchins’ (1996) study of the “mutual adaptation” of team members in their efforts to solve a problem of critical proportions
• the learning that occurs across organizations as a whole, exemplified in Cook and Yanow’s (1996) analysis of the adoption of a new technology in a traditional manufacturing setting. This was a cultural process in which “the dynamic, ongoing preservation of organizational identity is as compelling as an exclusive focus on learning new things and unlearning outlived ones” (p. 451)

Most chapters of the book are concerned with the second and third of these meanings of organizational learning.

The case for organizational learning

The call for organizations of all kinds to focus more on the individual and collective learning of their members is ubiquitous, and not new. With private sector organizations in mind, Edmondson and Moingeon (1996) argue, for example, that “organizations facing uncertain, changing or ambiguous market conditions need to be able to learn” (p. 7)—a sentiment that echoes a perspective that was articulated as early as the late 1960s (Terreberry, 1968). They need to learn adaptive responses to these uncertainties and ambiguities: this is learning what to do, what types of new practices to adopt. These organizations also need to learn how to do these organizational practices because, as Argyris (1996) explains:

no managerial theory, no matter how comprehensive, is likely to cover the complexity of the context in which the implementation is occurring. There will always be gaps and there will always be gap-filling. Organizational learning is critical to detecting and filling the gaps. (p. 1)

Schools clearly qualify as organizations facing the changing, uncertain, and ambiguous conditions alluded to by Edmonson and Moingeon. The terms “reform” and “restructuring” are in imminent danger of becoming simply catch-all phrases for a host of complex and often largely untested changes hotly advocated by politicians, parents, professionals and academics in developed countries around the world. Such changes create the same conditions of instability, and impermanence faced by most organizations approaching the end of the millenium. They also severely challenge virtually all organizational designs that rely on centralized planning, control, and direction, at the same time that some critics of schools look for simple “one-size-fits-all” solutions such as improved national tests or more a more standardized curriculum.

Theorists have begun to acknowledge that such conditions require that organizations have the capacity for self organization: the complexity of this postmodern environment demands full use of the intellectual and emotional resources of organizational members (Handy, 1989; Morgan, 1986). Mitchell, Sackney, and Walker (1997) argue, “The postmodern era suggests a conception of organizations as processes and relationships rather than as structures and rules” (p. 52), with conversation as the central medium for the creation of both individual meaning and organizational change. From this perspective, the image of schools as learning organizations seems like a promising response to the continuing demands for restructuring.

We can further clarify the strengths of approaching school reform and school redesign through the development of organizational learning processes when we compare this approach with two alternatives that have received greater attention in the educational literature to date. These are the “effective schools” and “backward mapping” alternatives.

Effective schools

The best known and most fully tested of these school reform and redesign alternatives entails rebuilding schools to reinforce the statistical correlates of effectiveness which have emerged out of extensive research in a number of countries (e.g. Scheerens and Bosker, 1997; Teddlie & Stringfield, 1993). In these studies, a school’s effectiveness is measured by the performance of students on standardized tests—usually those focusing on “basic skills” in reading and mathematics. There is some overlap between the most common effectiveness correlates and the conditions fostering organizational learning, for example, school culture, and collabortive decision-making structures (Cheng, 1996; Heck & Marcoulides, 1996). But there are large differences as well. For example: district conditions are only rarely considered relevant in the effective schools literature, whereas they appear to have considerable importance in fostering organizational learning (Coffin, 1997; Leithwood, Leonard & Sharratt, in press; McLaughlin, 1990); and the “instructional” models of leadership supported by the effective school research (Mortimore, 1993) are more control-oriented and less oriented toward capacity-development than the transformational leadership practices which, theoretically at least, seem likely to foster organizational learning.

More fundamental, however, is the crucial assumption implicitly embedded in much of the effective schools literature that a single best, albeit elusive, organizational design is suitable for most schools (Creemers & Reezigt, 1996). This assumption may be justifiable for schools pursuing essentially the same outcomes as those used as dependent measures in effective schools research, under at least largely similar circumstances. In contrast, an organizational learning approach to school design assumes that the initial conditions for effective learning must be established in many schools through special efforts which often may have to be launched from outside the school. But, given reasonable success through those initiatives, it is likely that subsequently the organization will not only be “self-organizing” but also “continually refining” in response to changes in its goals and the circumstances in which those goals are to be achieved. At any point in time, schools adhering to this approach could look very different from one another, except in respect to those core conditions necessary to sustain and encourage organizational learning.

Backward mapping

A second, less well-explored alternative is to design schools through a process of backward mapping, an approach advocated by a prominent group of school restructuring scholars (Peterson et al., 1996). This approach, adopting an open-systems, contingency perspective, argues that there ought to be consistent and “coherent” (Fuhrman, 1993) support for those teaching and learning activities which constitute the technical core of the school’s activities. When changes are undertaken in the technical core, the rest of the school should be appropriately redesigned to be as supportive as possible to those new practices. Similar to the organizational learning approach, backward mapping offers no specific model of a well-designed school, and assumes that many designs are possible depending on the nature of the technical core and its demands. While the basic premise of the backward mapping argument appears sensible on initial examination, it gives rise to four implications that are more debatable.

First, backward mapping implies a large universe of reasonable organizational design alternatives. However, the research literature suggests there is an upper limit on qualitatively different, identifiable designs that are available. Although the number of theoretical alternatives is large, people in “real” organizations do not operate under conditions that permit them to analyze more than a few options before acting. This range is likely restricted to between four and ten although many variants within these major categories can be readily imagined (e.g. Bolman & Deal, 1991; Daft, 1989; Galbraith, 1977; Mintzberg, 1983).

A second implication of the backward mapping argument is that every time a non-trivial change is made in a school’s core technology, that school’s structures, culture, policies and other aspects of its organization should be revisited, if not substantially revised. But this requirement overstates the differences in design demands of many different changes in core technology—and the competing demands for change outside the core. It also overstates the contribution of school, as distinct from classroom-level variables in accounting for variation in student growth (Scheerens et al., 1989; Scheerens and Bosker, 1997). Even a whole-hearted effort by staff to introduce new mathematics standards in the classroom, for example, may not require a major rethinking of the school organization. On the other hand, the introduction of a state-mandated change in the school schedule which has limited implications for classroom activities may demand substantial redesign of the school organization, including personnel and budget policies.

Furthermore, considerable evidence supports the claim that significant changes in schools require extensive amounts of time (Fullan, 1993; Louis & Miles, 1990). Weick (1994) has argued that one reason why the school system is segmented into semi-autonomous units, such as classrooms, is so that the time-consuming aspects of system change can be avoided until absolutely necessary. But this evidence has not taken into account the added demands for change accompanying the backward mapping strategy. If such a strategy were followed with every non-trivial change in core technology, schools would evolve at an even more ponderous rate of speed than is presently the case.

A third problematic implication of the backward mapping strategy is that only the demands of the core technology need attention in the creation of a coherent organizational design. Schools are not merely technical organizations. They have significant features that are institutionalized—either legally or informally—in response to local, national and international expectations regarding how schools should operate (Meyer & Rowan, 1991; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). Thus, the assumption that schools could be designed around changes in the technical core is naive, even if backward mapping advocates might wish to position schools more fully in the technical sector, eventually. However, virtually all well-established organizations have both a technical and an institutionalized component. So, as Mintzberg (1983) argues, virtually all organizations must attend both to internal consistency (designed according to the requirements of their core technology) and external consistency (designed to meet the demands of the wider polity and society).

A final dilemma for the backward mapping perspective lies in its assumption that changes in th...