Week 1 - sharing experience about learning in my workplace

Referring to Senge’s five disciplines for a learning organization, I find that my organization has lots of room for improvement in being a learning organization.  I would like to share my experience about learning in my workplace as follows:

Personal Mastery:  The management seldom spends time to communicate with staff about the organization’s mission and staff’s personal vision.  They are lack of quick awareness to the education reform during the recent year.  The situation applies to the restructure of our course programs and the General education courses become the core subjects that are critical in the survival of the whole division.  This leads to an urgent situation in well allocating the staff and teaching materials resources in coming semesters.

Mental models:  Many teaching staff are lack of teaching knowledge and experience in general education and not willing to take initiatives in developing the new subject “General Education” curriculum.

Shared vision:   Due to the restructure change of the course program, staff feel not secured and motivated in their job.  Staff has their own planning and the organization cannot provide a safe job place for staff commitment.

Team learning:  Team learning seldom encourages within the division.  The teaching sharing experience is only carried out at informal peer gatherings and not at formal communication.

System thinking:  My organization seems incapable to review the organization and personal vision together and can only solve problems at one by one case.  I think this will affect the teaching quality and student learning in future. 

Week 1 - experience sharing about learning in workplace

I work in a secondary school as an ICT teacher. The management of my school is very tradition: it respects personal mastery of teachers but there is insufficient commutation between teachers and executives. According to Senge’s five principles, my organization could be described as below:

Personal mastery – the teachers in my school always teach for their professional subject, and the mobility of teachers in my school is low. Therefore the teachers usually have their own personal vision for the development of their own SUBJECT. However, they usually have no vision for the development of whole school.

Shared vision – the executives seldom provide their vision on school development. They only make their requests for the teachers to solve.

Mental models – teachers willing to share their opinions privately, but there are no common way for them to reflect to executives.

Team learning – there is almost no team learning in my school. My school doesn’t provide chance or system to encourage team learning, especially sharing among teachers.

Systems thinking – there is no systems thinking in my school. Teachers in my school usually take their focus on their subject; they seldom view the development of our school as a whole.

Week 1 - experience sharing about learning in workplace

Week 1


Report on your present or previous experiences in the workplace.  How best would you describe your organization learnt.


I think that my organization may not be doing so well about learning in workplace.  According to Senge’s five principles that are crucial for schools to become learning organizations, my organization could be described as below:

• Personal mastery – my organization seems not able to develop a personal vision and aspirations and an awareness of current realities.  For example, our programs have been restructured and general education courses become dominant and the majority of programs.  However, teaching members seem not yet prepare for change, such as teachers are capable of teaching general education courses.

• Mental models – as most teachers do not have teaching experience about general education, they are not motivated to change or develop general education curriculum.

• Shared vision – the change may threaten the job security so that sense of commitment to the future cannot be established among teachers.

• Team learning – I think this is also not enough because regular communication or sharing is seldom made.  Experience sharing is carried out through informal setting, like social gathering or peer groups.

• Systems thinking – I think my organization may look at the goals and problems as isolated. For example, the large class size and heavy teaching load are the problems but they definitely affect students’ quality of learning in the meantime. 

When I came across with systems thinking, I find some difficulty to understand.  If you too, the below video - "Peter Senge: 2010 Systems Thinking in Action Conference Preview" may give you some ideas.

Group Members & Members' Contributions to Group Work

Group OL


Members:
Chan Man Kee, Alvis
Chan Tsz Chung, Oscar
Leung Yiu Tong, Eric
Wong Lai Kuen, Maria

Working Organization:
Alvis: Higher Education in Commerce division
Oscar: ICT Teacher in a Secondary School
Eric: ICT Teacher in a Secondary School
Maria: Higher Education in Commerce division

Course Expectations:

• due to recent education reform, we need to adapt our teaching strategies in changing environment
• to apply new technology to our teaching within limited resources
• to learn and apply models of change
• to use IT facilities to support students' learning
• to learn good practices through case study

Members' Contributions to Group Work:
As we are coming from two "types" of educational institutes - secondary school and higher education, we suggest grouping ourselves into 2 pairs. Each pair consists of a secondary school teacher and a teacher in higher education. In each week, the pairs have to take turn to play different roles - either providing learning reflection or giving feedback on the learning reflection. The purpose of this arrangement is to magnify the synergy within group so that we can learn from each other better.  Below is the schedule for our contributions to group work in different weeks.

Week	Learning Reflection	Feedback on Learning Reflection
1	All	All
2	Alvis & Oscar	Maria & Eric
3	Maria & Eric	Alvis & Oscar
4	Alvis & Oscar	Maria & Eric
5	Maria & Eric	Alvis & Oscar
6	All	All
7	All	All
8	All	All