Roadmap to SLO Transformation Journey
Introduction
School as Learning Organization (SLO) is argued to be an effective tool for schools to sustain in the constantly changing and complex environment. Through instilling the learning as a central tenet , school's learning capacity is improved from individual staff to team, to whole school and to societal learning. School's learning must be competent in analyzing both the internal efficiency and effectiveness and external threats and opportunities to stay competitive in the market. There are several benefits for SLO besides being adaptive to the environment. The first one is staff's outcome, job satisfaction and boost productivity. A meta research of Welsh schools by Kools et al. (2019) found the link between SLO and staff's outcome. Another research by Gouëdard, Kools & George (2023) confirmed the SLO with teacher's self efficacy and job satisfaction. Moreover, SLO can improve knowledge performance where innovation is the product of knowledge management. Knowledge is argued to be the valuable intangible assets in organization and it will support school to gain competitive advantage through continuous learning, improvement and innovation. Only innovation will differentiate one school from the others. SLO will foster innovation and it is differentiated itself from other schools, despite similar curriculum, premise, structure and system. The last benefit of SLO is financial performance. Although there are some public funded schools that demands no profits, financial performance can be measured with cost reductions in school operations, L&D and other aspects namely marketing. Being an SLO, non-profit schools can convert the saving (through operation cost reductions) into improving other aspects, particularly staff wellbeing and societal giveback to enhance school's CSR activity. Therefore, being SLO benefit the schools in learning from internal to external, improve staff's knowledge performance and job satisfaction which foster innovation for efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, all of these will improve financial performance (market shares, profit margins, high return on investment...) and cost reduction for nonprofit schools.
The Roadmap to SLO Transformation
Becoming an SLO will lead school to gain more advantages in the digital and AI society. However, we argue that SLO transformation is a systematic and structured journey involving high level decision making and comprehensive plan for implementing the processes to realize the goal (becoming SLO). Without explicit structure to guide the journey, transforming to SLO is like a waste of commitment, time and funds for a lost cause. Therefore we argue school to develop a roadmap for SLO transformation, which will be discussed as below.
Figure 1. Roadmap for SLO Transformation Journey
Step 1. Strategy Priorities
SLO transformation must be set as one of the strategic priorities that school needs to address in their strategic plan / direction. By embedding SLO in the strategic level, school will be able to design process and align performance to achieve the objectives and target. In the strategic plan of SLO transformation, key objectives and targets to achieve the transformation must be defined in the short-term(outputs, medium-term(outcomes) and long-term impact. The SLO strategic priority must also align with the school vision and mission. This alignment requires school to redefine their vision and mission when their SLO priority is approved. However, revising or redefining school vision should be done after the end cycle of strategic plan where gaps are identified in the strategic implementation. Therefore, we argued to adopt the SLO transformation if the strategy align with the extant school vision and mission and SLO can converge all the performance to achieve the vision and mission. If the SLO transformation misaligns with the school vision and mission, it is argued to put it in the new cycle of strategic plan.
Step 2. Policy
SLO transformation needs necessary policies to enforce the processes and to align performance to achieve objectives and key targets in the strategic plan of SLO. Key policies for supporting the SLO transformation processes are recommended to structure in guidelines, responsibility, key processes, resources (people, funds, materials, time and technology). The policy should outline key rationales for SLO transformation which is stemmed from the issues without SLO and advantages with SLO. Adopting the key objectives and targets as approved in the strategic plan to define responsibilities and to assign managers and teams with those responsibilities to achieve the results. The policy needs to define key processes to be discussed in step 3 for implementation.
Step 3. Process
Process is defined as an repeated and interrelated activity and it requires at least two activities to be a process. Work process is needed in organization to achieve the results. Without process, tasks will be carried out randomly and results are hard to measured. According to the process maturity model, there are five levels of process management, starting with the Level 1.Initial, Level 2. Managed, Level 3. Defined, Level 4. Quantitatively Managed and Level 5. Optimizing. Level 1 Initial process is poorly defined and reactive where activities are completed based on the necessity of teams. In order to support the SLO transformation, school must define process standards where process mapping must be done to provide overview of extant processes and the new emergent process when implementing the SLO plan. In defining the process model, school needs to identify the core processes, support process and management process. By differentiating these typical processes, school can determine what emergent process to add or to integrate (optimizing) with the existing ones.
Step 4. Communication
Communication is considered as the most fundamental element and challenges in organization. Communication in organization must follow the structure to avoid grapevine and implicit communication channels. Communication can be done in the close loop and in the loose loop. For the SLO transformation strategy to achieve, communication with all key leaders who will be responsible to implement the strategies is the most important step to agree on the concept, strategic objectives and key success targets. All leaders who are assigned with responsibilities in the policy must be knowledgeable and supportive of the SLO transformation strategies. Since they will plan their communication strategies further to inspire the teams for actions and achievements, effective communication with all leaders will ease the challenge in SLO strategy deployment.
Step 5. Deployment Strategy
The most important phase of strategy management is strategy deployment phase. How will leaders bring the strategic objectives and key success targets to their team to achieve the goals? The communication between leaders and their teams to drive highly effective performance is crucial for the SLO implementation. Leaders must prepare action plan to achieve the strategic objectives and targets with their teams. Setting the performance plan, incorporating the performance targets that is aligns with the SLO transformation targets and objectives, is the recommended plan for school leaders. Each team and department must have their performance plans (performance objectives, Key performance targets and results) to achieve the strategic objectives and key success targets. Staff’s competencies must also be analyzed to ensure there are no skill gaps in implementing the performance plan against the strategic targets. Leaders are strongly encouraged to develop a monitoring and evaluation tool to review the performances against the success of strategic objectives and key success targets. Adopting the Balanced Scorecard strategies is a recommended action for school leaders to manage their strategies and plan.
Conclusion
School as Learning Organization (SLO) has tremendous advantages for school to sustain in the complex and uncertain environment, which requires constant learning at all levels to be adaptive, innovative and responsive to the fast pace of changes. Digital and AI society pressures on school to reform and to transform into the SLO in order to survive. SLO transformation needs a roadmap which is presented above to inform the systematic and comprehensive changes in school. It involves a high level decision making to formulate a strategic priority for SLO transformation. Policy and process must be developed and optimized in order to successfully implement the strategic plan. Communication with all school leaders about SLO strategies, particularly key objectives and key success targets in a short-term and long-term results. School leaders must gain comprehensive understanding and acceptance to implement the SLO strategies. Finally, school leaders must prepare deployment plan to align team's performance with strategic objectives and key success targets. Performance plan, monitoring and evaluation must be conducted in the time framework. Achieving the SLO transformation is a key success milestone toward a learning school.
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