Strategic Design Toolkit for School as Learning Organization

School as Learning Organization has proven its indispensable tool for schools today to respond to the fast constantly changing environment where schools must prepare students for the complex and uncertain world. Learning Organization offers the ideal solutions to school through engaging learning at all levels, retaining knowledge capitals for innovation and continuous improvement. Being adopted by the global organizations, UNICEF, UNESCO and the OECD as a framework for school reform, the Integrated Model of SLO (Kools & Stoll, 1996) outlined the seven dimensions for the transformation journey to LO. Since SLO transformation journey is not a standalone, it is required to be initiated, agreed and approved by the top Leaders in schools to structure the journey in the policy and strategic documents. Having SLO transformation journey at the strategic levels will ensure the convergence, consistency, transparency and continuity of SLO transformation to be achieved. In addition, SLO as a strategic priority will also ensure sufficient fund allocation for operational actions. For all the actions to converge to SLO transformation, the SLO must be institutionalized in the strategic plan to align with the vision, mission and values of the school. 

School has multiple strategic priorities for competitive and sustainable operations. The key challenge is adopting the SLO strategies in the middle of the strategic plan cycle / period. Another vital consideration is aligning the SLO transformation with the school’s vision, mission and values, which the SLO may divert from all of these most important statements of the schools. Should school wait for their strategic plan cycle to end for the beginning of SLO transformation? In the disruptive circumstance of changes, school needs to radically adopt new strategies rather than a sitting duck watching the change to vanish. It will escalate to a bigger risk for schools to just think about it and take no actions. It is strongly recommended for school to design a strategic prototype which is in smaller scale and easily deployed to test the effects before going to the whole change at school. Why take into account the strategic design? 

Strategic Design phase is argued to be identical to the strategic analysis or situational analysis before formulating the strategies. There are several advantages of conducting the strategic design / strategic analysis. First, it helps inform the school it’s performance gaps and opportunity gaps. Second, it maps out the threats and necessary response to reduce or to eliminate the threats. Then strategic analysis can guide the key strategic priorities or school strategies to sustain and to be competitive. Strategic design needs explicit tools to conduct the school’s situational analysis for informing the strategic approaches. Several scholars argued strategy in a generic term “ a way to win”. Inspired by the nature of strategy ( to be winners), school, irrespectively not for profit, must design strategies to win ( sustainable operation, parent’s and student’s satisfaction and competitiveness). Strategic design is a critical and leading step for the strategy formulation and execution. Therefore, strategic design or analysis must be thoroughly triangulated to generate a comprehensive current and future performance data of schools for the next step.

There are several situational analysis tools available for choosing. The most common tool is SWOT analysis tool box which allows school to assess their internal strength, weakness and external threats and opportunities to impact on school current and future operation. PESTEL (Politics, Economics, Social, Technology, Environment and Legal) analysis is also an ideal tool for analysing the external environment which may cause disruption or opportunities for the organization / schools. To dive deeper into school specific performance, we recommend the Gap Analysis tool to evaluate the current performance (knowledge and financial aspects) against the future performance. Self evaluation of school current performance also yields benefits on school’s informed decision making for strategic approach or for setting a new strategic direction. Another value-added tool for strategic analysis is the school performance alignment using the Congruence Model by Nadler-Tushman to assess the five key organizational building blocks to align with school vision, mission, value and goals. This Congruence model framework is considered as a diagnosing tool for school to analyze their current performance. In addition, Ishikawa diagram or Fishbone diagram is also beneficial for schools to diagnose their internal efficiency, deficiency and effectiveness. Another self-diagnosing tool for school is Baldridge Excellence Framework which is proven as a quality improvement tool for the organization to build excellent quality for competitive advantages. Baldridge Excellence Framework laid the key six process criteria and one result criteria for measuring excellence performance. However, The first important step to do is self-evaluating the organizational profile illustrating two categories- Organization Environment and Organizational Relationship. 

Should schools apply all of these instruments for strategic design? The answer is “Yes” if you think one tool does not generate comprehensive school’s performance analysis for designing the SLO strategies. To become an effective SLO, school must fulfil all the seven-action oriented dimensions in the Integrated Model of SLO (Kools & Stoll, 2016). However, school has to define their strategies to achieve the SLO transformation in the frame of the performance results stemming from the schoolwide strategic analysis. Therefore, it is paramount for school to apply multi strategic analysis tools to generate comprehensive and true of current performance for the desired future performance to be sustainable in the hostile, complex and constantly changing environment. 

How to Build the Learning Support Environment for School as Learning Organization (SLO)!

Introduction

School as Learning Organization is argued as a disruptive change in the culture of learning. Learning Organization structures the learning as a system where all parts of the organization are engaged in the interconnected learning. According to Senge (1990), organization must enforce the interconnected thinking where all functions must learn from one another to understand and to better inform the changes that each unit, department or functions will make the decision. For example, the marketing department must understand the production department to provide better sale and branding strategies. Knowing how the products are made (quality measures and control...) will add better informed strategies to sale units to increase more sales. They know deeper into the production line and they can sell the them with confidences. Learning as a system is not favored by itself and staff is ready to engage. It requires building a learning support culture where learning as a system is embedded in the culture of organization. School as Learning Organization is not far from the learning organization in the way to foster learning support culture for teachers to engage learning as a system. Teachers' roles are not only teaching but leading the learning. Teachers must learn from and about students, their peers and the whole school system (polices, guidelines) and processes. Therefore, it is demanding that SLO needs a learning support culture where leaders must create the learning supportive environment for a systemic learning. 

According to the prominent culture model of Schein's (1985), culture in organization has three different but related layers  Artefacts, Values and Underlying Assumption. Artefacts are tangibles assets that can openly reveal cultures, namely policies, office layout, technology, infrastructure, campus design... Values intangible manifestation of the organizational believes, rationales which can be depicted in the structure, documents... Finally, the underlying assumption is the unconscious belief that determines how staff perceives, thinks and feels (Schein, 1990). The underlying assumption is vague and it is the source of creating value and behavior. According to Haiyan, Walker & Xiaowei (2017), they offered the synthesis of culture, basing on the Schein's model, in three components: visible learning culture ( organizational structure, policy), visible but intangible culture which fall in the learning supportive environment, leader's value in promoting learning of teachers and invisible component (underlying assumption) that is trust, belief and efficacy of teachers in learning. 

We have conducted a review of the LO model in our earlier post in this blog of the DLOQ model (Watkins & Marsick, 1997, 2003) and the Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990) to find a common learning levels in organization, the Individual level, Team level and Organizational level. Putting the three layers of culture model of Schein and the three levels of learning, we can conceptualize a learning support environment for engaging effective learning at all levels in schools. The conception is illustrated through the diagram below. 

- It all starts with School Vision, Mission and SLO strategies (for more info about this, refer to our earlier post of Roadmap for SLO Transformation Journey) with achievable goals, objectives, key measures and targets of SLO transformation). This part sets the overarching direction for scaling down from organizational level to individual level. To build an effective learning support environment, school must align all their actions, times and resources with the Vision, Mission and Strategies. 

- Organizational Level Learning is conceptualized to capture the big visible pictures where all staff know and can rely on the system which is best matched with the Artefacts of the Schein's culture model. The top leaders must achieve the Learning Policy Framework, build physical and ICT infrastructure for learning and develop a system to capture and to utilize the learning data for improvement and innovation. It is necessary that school must have a learning management system (cloud-based or standalone database) for managing learning and assessment of learning of all students and staff. Knowledge management is a key tenet for innovation. Innovation helps school attain competitive advantages or sustainability. Since tacit knowledge of staff is hard to be captured but valuable for school to improve, school needs to build a knowledge management system to capture key improvement ideas of staff through establishing a proper channel of ideation for school improvement to better manage the flow of ideas. Then school should develop the methods to turn these ideas through filtering and targeting the ideas for school improvement only. Generally vague, personal issue or critic ideas by staff without any solutions should be considered as wastes and school can get rid of them. Therefore, school needs to set up the knowledge management system to support ideas for improvement and to store the best knowledge for innovation. 

- Team Level Learning is positioned to the layer of Value building which the whole schools adopt shared vision, culture and values. Team Level engagement is to establish a team mental models which take school vision, mission and goals into team's goals, actions and results. Translating school's vision for learning, building learning culture and agreeing on learning values and philosophy are argued to foster the learning by all larger teams (departments) and smaller teams (units). Team leaders must exemplify the learning model by inspiring and influencing the learning through sharing and agreeing on the school vision and strategies for learning (SLO strategies). To achieve these strategies, teams must establish the learning culture, values and philosophy to inspire and to empower the team's learning that align with the school vision for learning. At the level of learning, team leaders needs to ensure the team's clarity, expectation and acceptance of the shared vision for learning and the SLO strategies.

- Individual Level of Learning relies on the individual staff learning approach with the support of school leaders to enable the metacognitive learning, experimental learning and self-directed learning. At this lowest level of learning in school, staff member is argued to enact their self-regulated initiatives to improve learning of their own. With the support of their leaders for enabling and supporting the individual learning to gain the ground. For example, school must allocate self-paced learning time for teachers to improve their professional knowledge. Staff member needs to catch up with metacognitive strategies for learning or learning to learn and to catch on with the learning by doing (experimental learning). The single objective of individual level learning is to ignite staff's belief, mental model and efficacy of learning which is argued in the Underlying Assumption of Schein's culture model. The goal of individual level of learning is to streamline staff's conscious belief and intrinsic motivation with school's learning vision as demonstrated in the SLO strategic plan. There are several advantages of early exposure of learning deep inside the mind and heart of individual staff member to arouse their intrinsic motivation for continuous learning and innovation. 

Conclusion

SLO transformation journey requires the SLO strategies to set the directions for learning and innovation. Building the learning support environment is argued to be conducive to achieving the SLO transformation through engaging all levels of learning. Schein's model of culture in organization posited three key layers of culture manifestations in the organization. To build the learning support culture / environment, we conceptualize the three levels of learning under the three layers of culture to build an effective enabling environment for attaining the essence of learning. SLO transformation is a disruptive change in learning culture which require an alteration of learning strategies at all levels to embrace the positive changes as the products of learning in school. Therefore, it is argued for top leaders of the schools to plan and deploy the strategies to support learning at all levels.