Is Your School District a Learning Organization?
By: Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO, Vivify Performance
Schools and the districts under which they sit exist to promote and enable learning for kids. But, does this make them true learning organizations?
I recently presented at a conference to a group of educators working in varying roles in schools, districts and state education agencies. During our discussion, one of the participants talked at length about the pressure he and his colleagues feel to know everything about everything. He said, “We are expected to be experts at everything; we are afraid to say I don’t know.”
In this age of advancing technology, it’s unlikely that any one person has all the answers. When we are afraid to speak freely and fear “punishment” for introducing a new idea, we reduce the opportunity to expand our mental model and we undercut learning. When we believe that we already know even what we don’t know, we close our minds to new information. According to Edward Hess, author of “Learn or Die,” possessing a closed mind and denying and deflecting new information inhibits learning.
Learning Organizations Impact Students
School employees’ learning mindsets and behaviors affect the learning mindsets and behavior of the kids that come to school to learn each day. School districts and their respective schools can improve at fostering learning when employees become the best learners they can be. This is because learning organizations aren’t defined by how much people know, but whether people are enabled to be the best learner they can be.
Survey: Is your school district a learning organization?
right people + right environment + right processes = High-Performance Learning Organization (HPLO)
Use the checklist below to determine if your school district is on track to become what Hess calls a High-Performance Learning Organization.
Adaptive Leadership: My school district has leaders at every level who continually learn, they get to know their people individually and emotionally and they understand their hopes, dreams, fears and concerns. Leaders, managers and principals model the mindsets and behaviors they desire. They behave in ways to earn trust of employees and engenders belief they are respected and unique individuals and that manager care about their personal growth and performance.
Caring Relationships: My school district encourages the formation of deep meaningful friendships at work. We understand that meaningful relationships are essential to meaningful work.
Learning Processes: My school district encourages critical and creative thinking, discovery, and experimentation processes, including after action reviews that are necessary to enable learning. We have an established a code of learning conduct for leaders and teams that treats people with respect and dignity and gives them permission to speak freely without fear of punishment.
Positive Learning Culture:
People centricity: My school district is focused on mastery and growth mindsets; we seek to engage employee and student learners emotionally by treating all with respect, dignity, and trust
Emotionally positive: My school district takes steps to reduce learning inhibitors such as stress and fear of failure
Learning environment: My school district ensures our environment meets the fundamental needs for self-determination model: autonomy, relatedness and effectiveness
Psychological safety: Free from judgement, ridicule
Recognizes students as individuals
School districts that pursue not just academic metrics, but behavioral metrics will be best positioned to enable and promote learning for kids and employees alike and to become learning organizations as we move farther into the 21st century. Stay tuned to read my upcoming blog on how you can create a high performance school district.