School Leadership and Complexity Theory by Morrison Keith;

Author:Morrison, Keith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1099099
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Table 4.3 Self-assessment scale for types of learning in a school as a learning organization

Sharing knowledge for organizational learning

The school as a learning organization should be able to access and create new knowledge, using external resources for obtaining knowledge, and integrating new knowledge into the schools and applying it (Huber, 1991). For this the school should provide mechanisms to select, store, access, retrieve and utilize knowledge through a range of media, provide teachers units with incentives to learn, innovate and practise new knowledge, share knowledge and practices between all units in the school, and evaluate knowledge for its potential contribution to developing the school (cf. Tetenbaum, 1998).

Finding a means of incorporating information into an organization’s belief or value system turns information into knowledge; information is data that have been classified and interpreted (Devlin, 1991). Data are unused, potential information, and information, once used, potentiates the knowledge-building organization (see Lissack, 1996: 7). Weick and Daft (1984) distinguish between data and knowledge in their notion of ‘interpreting information’; they argue that information has to be understood and built into conceptual schemes.

Knowledge is key to the ‘business’ of schools, and the rate of increase of knowledge doubles every twelve to eighteen months (Fullan, 2001: 22). It is usually created and held by individuals rather than the organization (Grant, 1999: 1). For knowledge to be distributed it has to be both meaningful and organized (Drucker, 1999: 126), perhaps, with established and accepted protocols and languages for sharing it (cf. Probst and Büchel, 1997; Hong, 1999). Indeed Coleman (1999: 39) suggests that knowledge sharing should be part of the incentive and reward system of an organization. Youngblood (1997: 63) suggests replacing the commonly held view of sharing information on a ‘need to know’ basis, wherein the holder decides who needs to know, with the recipients deciding what they need to know. He suggests that, if information and knowledge is the lifeblood of organizations, then high quality and ‘diverse interactions are the beating heart’; deprived of sharing and interaction an organization suffers cardiac arrest.

Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) suggest the need for interactive networks of knowledge within the organization. Here Rosenberg (2000) suggests that ICT has a powerful role to play, not only in the sharing of text-based knowledge, but in the potential that multimedia have for visual and image-based sharing – virtually face-to-face communication and rich interaction.

Stacey (2001: 4, 220) suggests that knowledge is not a ‘thing’, reified and commodified, but an ‘active process of relating’. He argues (ibid: 5) that it is part of the participatory self-organization of organizations. Knowledge, he avers, is being produced, reproduced and transformed through interaction and relations (ibid: 6, 98), and the creation of knowledge is a participatory, communicative activity. Knowledge only becomes knowledge when it is shared and social (cf. Brown and Duguid, 1991, 2000); it resides less in databases than it does in people (Stacey, 2001: 121), as it is the people involved who evaluate its worth. Stacey’s views are echoed by Cilliers (2000: 10) in his comment that knowledge, as interpreted data, only becomes meaningful in the process of interaction.

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