Examine the Relevance of Processes in How Individuals and Organizations Learn

Instructions

You will now examine how individuals, teams, and the organization as an entity learn.

Identify the significant differences (or similarities) relevant to how each level of the organization learns. Then, prepare an evaluation of two (2) or three (3) significant opportunities that are most needed or likely to have a positive impact in the organization you have chosen to research.

Discuss how you will implement these opportunities and what changes may be required to overcome any obstacles you can anticipate.

Support your evaluation with a minimum of three resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources, including older articles, may be included.

Length: 5-7 pages, not including title and reference pages

Your evaluation should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University's Academic Integrity Policy.

Pedagogic challenges in the learning organization

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Introduction

In recent years pedagogical approaches appear increasingly significant regarding learning in working life, workplace learning and learning organizations. Billett (2008) conceptualizes the relations between educational efforts and peoples' everyday learning processes at work as pedagogic issues and qualities. Pedagogic activities as "work-based learning" (Siebert et al. , 2009) and "work-integrated learning" (Martin et al. , 2012) are structured educational attempts to facilitate learning processes at work showing the importance of linking pedagogy and workplace learning together. Although Senge's (1990) interest in dialogue, team learning and leaders' role as teachers, more elaborated pedagogical perspectives are not emphasized in literature on the learning organization (TLO) tradition or in the knowledge management (KM) approach particularly. However, Lustri et al. (2007) propose to connect the tradition of KM to TLO and describe a link between the technical aspects of organizational creation and storing of knowledge and a sociocultural approach of theories of learning. The authors' approach appears as a pedagogic intervention effort considering especially the strategic steering of interpretative and reflective aspects of individuals' learning processes. They also point to the importance of team learning to spread experiences and individual knowledge. Knowledge in an organization is a contextual construction, practice-based and often tacit (Gherardi, 2009). It is a result of complex social processes of team learning and appears difficult to manage effectively (Sondergaard et al. , 2007). This, in turn, increases the interest of pedagogic leadership described as a research-based interactive process of facilitating learning through reflections and actions (Albinsson and Arnesson, 2012). Studies of different kind of contradictions in organizations also call for pedagogic interventions to create a culture that supports critical and opposing opinions and make tacit knowledge explicit (Osono et al. , 2008). Contradictions are often described as underlying tensions in the organization expressed through conflicts of interest (Smith and Tushman, 2005). The specific context in this study is pedagogic interventions in local school organizations and teachers' learning. Other studies show that teachers' team learning processes are dependent on the social and emotional creation of a collaborative and nurturing atmosphere (McCotter, 2001; Leithwood et al. , 1997; Meirink et al. , 2010). Teachers' work is in several respects a complex social and emotional practice difficult to manage and to evaluate (Hargreaves, 2003). This complexity also generates severe tensions and conflicts regarding teachers' professional growth (Biesta, 2009; Pareja Roblin and Margalef, 2013).

Thus, recent research on TLO and KM actualizes the need of both pedagogic analyses and concrete interventions in practice. The supposed need of pedagogy does not mean that solely educational arrangements or a particular curriculum are favoured. Instead, it is argued that it is a pedagogic challenge to identify, analyse and handle difficulties and contradictions to improve and facilitate learning processes in the organization. The aim of this paper is to further clarify a conceptual understanding of pedagogic challenges in TLO and to propose a model for pedagogic interventions in organizations. The paper is based on empirical findings in a multi-case study of local quality development processes in schools and focuses particularly on contradictions and challenges regarding organizational learning. In the final section, implications of these findings are discussed as a research-based model of pedagogic interventions in creating TLO.

Theoretical framework

TLO is often depicted as a metaphorical and visionary construction based on system theories and a variety of learning and knowledge theories (Senge, 1990; Starkey et al. , 2004). Fundamentally, TLO implies facilitating of organization members' ongoing learning processes and construction of organizational knowledge (Lustri et al. , 2007). Organizational learning can be described as the driving force through which the organization's members create shared meaning and organizational knowledge (Kim, 1993). Dixon (1994) identifies four distinct and interrelated activities in organizational learning processes, generation of information, integration of information into the organization, collective interpretation of information and, finally, action based on interpreted meaning. The author describes these activities as steps in cyclic organizational learning processes. Through these processes of transforming information, organization members create knowledge potentially institutionalized in collective meaning structures in the organization together (Dixon, 1994). These collective meaning structures serve as the stored organizational knowledge base available for individuals' thoughts and further actions. Similarly, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) describe interaction between the organization's explicit and implicit knowledge as the dynamic force in organizational learning processes and development of organizational knowledge. The explicit knowledge is expressed through words, codes or formulas and therefore easy to share for people in the organization. The implicit knowledge is the subjective tacit knowledge which is much more difficult to formalize and share with others, but is still essential for the individual's understanding and actions.

Thus, organizational learning, necessary for the creation of TLO, is a collective learning process including peoples' ongoing social and cultural interaction. Critical issues in the collective learning process concern individuals' opportunities to participate in generation and spreading of information and to take an active part in continuous dialogue and collective interpretations. Through these processes, people are able to make their private meaning structures available to others and thereby express different experiences, thoughts and feelings that are necessary for the emergence of organizational learning (Dixon, 1994). Attempts to manage knowledge processes need to take these complex explicit as well as implicit social processes into account (Herrmann et al. , 2007). Team learning and self-managed teams are often described as triggers of organizational learning and as solutions to the difficulties in managing tacit knowledge (Knapp, 2010). Through dialogue and close face-to-face interaction, team members are supposed to learn together and create shared practice-based understanding and collective knowledge on how to handle tasks and problematic situations (Kayes et al. , 2005). A team with a supporting atmosphere helps their members to share experiences, reflections and emotions. Such atmosphere, a "team-think" (Neck and Manz, 1994), allows team members to create mutual awareness with regard to everyday practice and also to express different opinions and contradictions. Contradictions are presumably important driving forces regarding team learning processes if team members deal with them consciously and constructively. In the literature on organizational learning, the term contradiction generally appears vague, fuzzy and inconsistently defined, mainly connoted to some kind of conflicting processes in the organization. Important theoretical attempts to conceptualize contradictions more thoroughly emphasize that contradictions are based on structural conditions explained by socio economic theories (Engeström and Sannino, 2011), on contextually dependent processes explained by theories on social constructivism (Hatch, 1997) and on organizational defence patterns explained by socio-psychological theories (Argyris, 1990). According to these theoretical views, contradictions are always underlying latent tensions that need to manifest to become obvious. The manifestations of contradictions concern cognitive as well as social and emotional aspects of people's conflicting activities and actions (Argyris, 1990; Hatch, 1997).

A pedagogic perspective on learning organization concerns analysis of contextual conditions for learning processes as well as the forming of strategies for interventions to promote learning (Döös and Wilhelmson, 2011). Organization pedagogics deals with the processes of organizing, conceptualized as processes of coordination through which resources and actions are transformed into collective action for an organization's goal achievements. Organizational pedagogic analysis provides conceptual tools to identify contradictions and other challenges with regard to learning processes. Pedagogic interventions are presumed to facilitate peoples' learning and to help them to organize their activities more coherently. A pedagogic intervention in an organization is therefore an attempt to improve and develop the organizational knowledge and collective actions; e.g., helping the organization to learn and facilitate managing processes based on shared understanding.

Method

This research and development project was carried out during a three-year period in a small Swedish municipality consisting of 17 schools at secondary school level. The first aim was to explore how teachers and head teachers in the different schools identify and analyse quality and also how teachers' teams learn collectively and create collective knowledge. The second aim was to contribute to, and intervene in, the schools' practical development to establish a "learning organization". The project included general interventions and feedback from the researcher to all the head teachers and the administrative manager. These interventions helped the head teachers to carry out their quality analyses and write reports on quality assessments. Initially, the head teachers and the administrative manager reported some obstacles regarding the quality work in the school activity. These obstacles concerned mainly attempts to organize collegial discussions on quality analyses and collaborative team work. To further study the quality work at a local school level, the project has a multi-case study design, including one case school and two other schools used as comparative groups. This paper deals with findings from this case study. Interventions in the case school were based on analysis of the collected data material. In the comparative schools, no interventions were carried out, and the interviews in these schools were made to see if the teachers' show other experiences compared with teachers in the case school.

A total of 39 in-depth interviews were carried out and recorded. The interviews with the head teachers included questions about their experienced difficulties and opportunities in their responsibilities as managers. In-depth interviews with the teachers were semi-structured by a limited number of items concerning critical aspects of the local school's quality work. Questions included, for example, "What do you think about your school's quality work?", "Do you think you have good opportunities to participate in the quality work and in team activities?", "Do you communicate and share experiences and ideas with your team mates and other colleagues?" "Can you describe how your school has improved and managed the quality work during the last year?" Data collection in the case school included observations of teachers' team meetings, management team meetings as well as head teachers' daily work (Table I). The researcher observed meetings and documented in field notebook particular parts of the conversations and experienced emotional atmosphere during the meetings. Intervention activities and reflection seminars were carried out and some follow-up interviews were made to clarify teachers' reflections on effects and consequences of the interventions.

The transcribed interviews represent the main part of the data material. Notes from observations were used as complementary information about teachers' collective quality work. A thematic analysis was made to explore qualities and patterns within data and to interpret various themes (Boyatzis, 1998). Different themes were identified in teachers' utterances and descriptions of how they conducted quality assessments, how they communicated with each other and how they experienced opportunities to take part in quality discussions. The first step of the analysis process was mainly concentrated on descriptions of teachers' various responses to concrete interview questions. In the further interpretative analysis, central concepts within the frame of organizational learning theory were used as "sensitizing concepts" which focused the analysis (Bowen, 2006). In the analysis of underlying patterns, "contradictions" were focused to conceptualize learning obstacles and pedagogic challenges. With reference to Dixon's (1994) central concepts, "generating", "integrating" and "interpreting" information as well as "collective action", were used as tools for theorizing the significance of the findings with regard to organizational learning. Thus, the conducted thematic analysis process can be described as an ongoing movement from a purpose to explore different qualities in the data material to attempts to conceptualize and theorize findings (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

During the intervention phase, the researcher initiated seminars for collective reflections to promote collective learning processes through identification of implicit aspects of work. A typical intervention technique used was to describe quality aspects and reflect critically on presented examples from daily work situations in the classroom and from critical incidents in collaborative work with team mates. Concrete examples were based on the researcher's observations, but presented without revealing details for involved teachers. Another intervention was to establish new collective structures through collective reflections between teams. The researcher intervened in the prevailing management team (head teacher and the team leaders of the school's five teacher teams). This team that previously mostly had served as a forum for information was now engaged in reflection seminars, with the researcher as a process leader. The collective reflection sessions always started with concrete examples from situations in everyday work which generated discussions on quality matters. Thus, the members of the management team started collaborative activities with the main aim to further stimulate collaboration between teams. A further step in the intervention process was to work together with the head teacher to facilitate the managing processes. This phase of intervention basically concerned structural improvements of quality assessments and attempts to increase the head teacher's awareness of teachers' difficulties and conflicts regarding quality issues. More thorough feedback dialogues were arranged to collectively interpret new information as well as institutionalized meaning of quality work.

Findings

In some respects, the case study confirmed head teachers' initial descriptions of obstacles to quality work. Taken together, the findings in all the three schools showed a variety of contradictions. Despite some differences between schools, the identified contradictions were typically related to three aspects of the local quality work:

to the identification and analysis of quality;

to collaboration on teams; and

to managing processes.

The three schools used questionnaires and rating scales as standardized measurements to evaluate pupils' progress in different respects. Head teachers and teachers were mainly concentrated on pupils' learning outcomes in terms of grades as the most obvious criteria of quality. Consequently, quantitative results were more focused in the local schools' quality analyses than more complex reasoning on process-related qualities. However, several teachers especially in case school and school 2 explained that relations to pupils include much more of treatment with certain social and emotional implications for quality in everyday work. Simultaneously, teachers also claimed that they usually avoided more extensive reflective collegial discussions on quality. Thereby, they did not collectively attend to tacit aspects of everyday work within the quality analyses or assessments. One teacher in school 2 said about the quality work:

Some basic knowledge and learning processes are possible to measure, but the important teacher and pupil interaction is much more difficult. But we all know that this everyday interaction contains several important aspects of quality, both regarding pupils "progressing behavior and teachers" ways of acting. It's too much pressure on documentation today.

). Dilemmas were expressed when teachers agreed on the importance of quality analyses and assessments and when they simultaneously avoided identifying important qualities (

Another contradiction expressed in all the three schools concerned the organization of teachers' team work, and these findings confirm results from other studies (Leithwood et al. , 1997; Meirink et al. , 2010). Several teachers mentioned that no collaborative efforts were conducted to enhance quality in everyday work or to create indicators for measurement in the quality assessment. One teacher in the case school said that many teachers at her school were not interested in team work or collaborative projects. She also said they usually avoid collective reflections on everyday work. Another teacher on the same team described the problem in a somewhat different view: "We talk a lot, and we talk about the importance of reflections. But surely, we don't really reflect together in practice upon collaboration or teachers' role!" Teachers on this team mentioned that avoidance of collaboration mirrored a lack of commitment concerning the local school's collective work. However, this avoidance of collaboration was sometimes replaced by emotionally loaded conflicts. The observations at team meetings in the case school showed emotionally loaded arguments and conflicts between teachers with regard to their respective views on a teacher's role. The observed conflicting views appear as manifestations of contradictions mainly concerned with cognitive and contextual constructions of a teacher's role at school and in a classroom. These contradictions were expressed through explicit conflicts and sometimes through a mutual and non-reflected avoidance of collaboration. This implies that although the head teachers and the teachers intended to work together, they simultaneously avoided and refrained from collaboration due to their conflicting views. In a school context, these findings indicate a need of a supporting atmosphere that enables teachers' critical reflections and opposing opinions (McCotter, 2001).

Teachers in the case school described weaknesses regarding managing processes and a lack of continuity and durability in the quality work. Several teachers from one of the teams emphasized that their head teacher avoided his responsibility as a manager and leader. Teachers on this team described difficulties to make sense of the manager's collection of information through questionnaires. They claimed that their earlier experiences were not attended to at all, and they point particularly to weak managing of routines for feedback and dialogue. Some of them required formalized instructions and more elaborated collective intentions regarding quality matters to go on. However, other contradictory voices were also expressed in the interviews; one of the teachers said that she preferred the head teacher to keep outside and to not intervene in her classroom work or in team discussions. She claimed that the head teacher threatened her professional autonomy. In sum, teachers' utterances in the case school, and some examples from school 2, expressed a kind of paradox concerning relations between, on the one hand, the institutionalized formal instructions to obey and, on the other hand, autonomy to make decisions based on individual experiences. The head teacher in school 3 preferred to put the responsibility for quality development on self-managed teams. However, there were no indications of team learning or collective improvements in these teams. Consequently, no attempts at all were made to collectively improve the quality work in school 3. Hence, these examples confirm underlying strong tensions regarding issues on collective interpretations, institutionalizing of knowledge and space for individual tacit knowledge in teachers' professional development (Hargreaves, 2003) (Table II).

The interventions in the case school resulted in collective reflections between teachers about how they treated pupils, how they handled meetings with pupils' parents and how they tried to solve conflicts between pupils. However, this kind of in-depth conceptual reflections was rare, and the teachers appeared uneasy during such conversations. During the intervention phase, the head teacher confirmed several difficulties regarding practical management. He described his main problem to balance different intentions and opinions among teachers from different teams. In the follow-up interviews with teachers and head teacher in the case school, they expressed overall positive responses on the intervention activities, although some difficulties remained. Several teachers confirmed a positive effect regarding new insights in others' perspectives on everyday work and classroom experiences. The staff members in the management team described that the interventions added something new to the discussion and provided feedback to their respective team. These findings indicate emerging team learning processes of importance for organizational learning (Lustri, et al. 2007). Regarding attempts to structure and institutionalize quality work, the responses were more vague and hesitating. Some of the teachers mentioned that the head teacher had improved his leadership. Also, the head teacher himself commented that the interventions had helped him to see more of the complexity of quality work in his organization and raised his awareness of teachers' challenges and difficulties. As expected, teachers in the two other schools described no such effects, although teachers in school 2 said that they had improved their collegial discussions in some respects. They also described that the head teacher more clearly presented the importance of quality assessments and quality issues in everyday work. Teachers in school 3 did not describe any changes regarding quality work.

Discussion and practical implications

Although the interventions showed some positive results and appeared promising with regard to team learning, contradictions that challenge learning processes call for a more general analytic discussion and elaborated interventions. Following Dixon (1994), the identified contradictions are challenges to further steps in the organizational learning cycle and the collective movements between the private, accessible and collective meaning structures. Teachers' dilemmas to identify and make explicit the tacit aspects of quality in everyday work certainly impede the important step of generating experience-based information through accessible meaning structures in the organization. As a consequence, important information regarding teachers' quality assessments is excluded and will not be integrated in the organizations' collective knowledge. This dilemma means that teachers on the one hand are trying to follow the instructions of quality work and they admit the purpose, but on the other hand, they see the requirements as a control function impeding them from identification and evaluation of important quality aspects of everyday work. With reference to Herrmann et al. (2007), this is an important challenge for organizational learning and managing processes. The observed conflicts of interests regarding collaboration contain collective learning potentials, including possible exchange of viewpoints and perspectives. But the avoidance of collective reflections threatens this potential and tends to decrease opportunities to integrate and interpret information collectively (Dixon, 1994). Finally, the paradoxes regarding managing processes and teachers' autonomy tend to impede head teachers' and teachers' forming of actions based on collective interpreted meaning and institutionalized knowledge in the organization.

A further conceptualization of these contradictions reveals that they are partly cognitively related to peoples' meaning structures and their efforts to make sense, but also extensively social and emotional in character. When contradictions are manifest in ongoing dialogue and collective reflections, they contribute to the creation of explicit knowledge in the organization (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Hence, these verbally expressed contradictions are part of the accessible meaning structures created by the organization members and appear as alternative frameworks among teachers and their leaders (Dixon, 1994). In some examples, teachers show elaborated reasons for why they did not follow demanded collaboration on the team, or avoided to use the questionnaire, for example. These alternative actions appear as a kind of conscious and reflected resistance to commanded instructions or recommendations, based on reasons and motives. In this respect, the explicit contradiction looks like a potential for collective learning processes allowing critical reflections on alternative actions and opposing views (Osono et al. , 2008). Other contradictions, as dilemmas in teachers' images of quality matters or paradoxes regarding managing processes, are mainly dealt with by avoidance of collective reflections. The tendency to not communicate aspects of quality, collaboration or managing processes shows important social and emotional defence mechanisms that cover the contradictions and thereby block their learning potential. According to Argyris (1990), organization members tend to defend themselves and their routines when they experience threats and new demands on change. The quality work in all the schools in this study demonstrates defence mechanisms indicating teachers' emotional unwillingness to participate collectively in change efforts (McCotter, 2001). In some respects, the described dilemmas and paradoxes in this case seem to mirror power-related structural inconsistency regarding managers' control and teachers' autonomy (Engeström and Sannino, 2011). These structural circumstances are usually not dealt with explicitly or conceptually in teachers' and head teachers' communication; instead more personal and emotional expressions are frequent. This probably explains why some contradictions appear more resistant to interventions. Furthermore, this indicates that dilemmas and paradoxes, more than conflicting views, are difficult to conceptualize, communicate and make explicit to share. Consequently, these contradictions often remain as underlying tensions in organizations with considerable amount of tacit or implicit knowledge (Lustri, et al. 2007; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) and a lack of team think (Neck and Manz, 1994).

Taken these findings into account, a practical conclusion is that the most fundamental pedagogic challenge seems to be the creation of an atmosphere that helps organization members to conquest practice collectively and critically through identifying, communicating and handling of contradictions. Therefore, an elaborated pedagogic intervention loop model is suggested here as a tool for managing tacit knowledge. The model provides pedagogic interventions systematically linked to work-integrated learning processes in the organization (Martin et al. , 2012). Findings in this study indicate a need of rigorous intervention techniques combining dialogue, collective reflections on concrete actions and critical incidents as well as structural improvements. Dialogic loop movements comprise the challenges to deal with identified dilemmas, conflicts and paradoxes as potentials for learning (Figure 1).

The pedagogic intervention model is intended to facilitate organizational learning processes by linking generating of information based on identifications of tacit knowledge, through integrating and collective interpreting, to forming new actions (Dixon, 1994; Kim, 1993). The model relies heavily on the importance of team learning (Lustri et al. , 2007) and creation of explicit shared understanding and team think (Kayes et al. , 2005). In connection to Albinsson and Arnesson (2012), this pedagogic model implies pedagogic leadership and team learning activities, either initiated by an involved researcher or by regular managers or team leaders. A leadership that facilitates learning processes certainly moves beyond and emphasizes other connotations than traditional and technical KM approaches (Sondergaard et al. 2007). To manage tacit knowledge, to identify contradictions and to facilitate shared understanding, the pedagogic interventions need to be communicative and allowing in a way that makes it possible for people to question and feel secure in their participation in critical collective reflections and construction of collective meaning structures. Findings presented in this study are important particularly in a school and teacher context. Consequently, the suggested model emanates basically from a context of school organizations' change processes regarding quality work. In many respects, these contextual limitations restrict the potential to generalize the results and the practical implications. Nonetheless, it seems plausible that the suggested pedagogic intervention model has a potential to contribute more generally to organizational learning and thereby to practical creation of TLO, although some contextual adjustments of the model probably are necessary. Forthcoming pedagogic research and development projects in other fields should consider and further clarify these issues.