Innovation and the Persistence of Old Solutions

Abstract

Interventions that result in school improvement are difficult to accomplish. The widespread failure of restructuring as a mechanism to achieve significant change has led to a greater focus on process as more effective in facilitating improvement (van den Berg, Vandenberghe & Sleegers, 1999). Much of the process focus is aimed at creating schools that can best be described as learning organisations (Leithwood, Jantzi & Steinbach, 1995; Resnick & Hall, 1998; Scribner, Cockrell, Cockrell & Valentine, 1999). The burgeoning literature in this area has led to various conceptualisations of the term, but generally refers to the process whereby organisational members identify what they want to achieve and develop strategies that help them to learn about the effectiveness of their practice in reaching their goals. In education contexts, the development of organisational learning has been linked to increasing the capacity of schools to ‘engage in and sustain continuous learning of teachers and the school itself for the purpose of enhancing student learning’ (Stoll, 1999, p. 506). Newmann, King and Rigdon (1997) are more specific about what they consider to be involved. They described schools with high capacity as ones in which ‘… school staff developed explicit schoolwide standards that focused on student performance, mechanisms for collecting and reviewing relevant information, and a culture of peer pressure among teachers that served as potentially important consequences’ (p. 63).