Prioritizing+Learning

I would imagine that the modern practice of education has stemmed from the culture of one room school houses that existed in a much earlier American society. I wonder if it would be viewed as acceptable if today’s banks or medical professionals operated under the same norms and practices as they did at the turn of the 20th century. Of course that would be ridiculous, right? Yet many American schools have evolved very little over the last one-hundred years. While school buildings may have many classrooms, as teachers do we not operate as if we were one room school houses? If we have a great idea on how to present a lesson on slavery do we share it with our fellow social studies teachers? Of course not, that was our idea and we want everyone to know that. Plus as teachers the most important thing we can achieve is control over our own domains. Well it is under these assumptions that “real” growth in modern American education has stalled. Collinson and Cook (2007) introduce “prioritizing learning for all members” as their first core assumption (related to organizational learning). What does this mean? Isn’t learning for the students? How do you prioritize learning across a school building for faculty? Simply put, our students cannot learn if we refuse to learn and we certainly cannot learn as professional educators on our own. While we all have knowledge we bring to our schools, much of which is tacit and difficult to express to our fellow teachers. Yet, for organizational learning to occur we need to push past our mindsets of teaching as an individual endeavor and make it collective. When knowledge becomes shared it has potential to emerge as organizational learning. For an experiment I Google searched “lesson plans for teachers” and the following is a link to what I retrieved. [] Its amazing to see what teachers are willing to share with the world, but what is sometimes so difficult to share with the teacher next door.

Six Conditions