From Implementation to Negotiation: Investigating Continuous Improvement and Design Methods as an Approach to Fostering Organizational Learning

• In Event: Organizational Theory: New Foci, New Agendas

Abstract

Although scholars and practitioners are committed to the ideal of schools operating as learning organizations, we lack a consensus around how to reliably foster organizational learning in schools. This is due both to the endemic uncertainties of schools as organizations, as well as competing theories about how to foster organizational learning. In this paper we investigate to what extent and in what ways four different continuous improvement and design (CID) methods—an emerging constellation of approaches designed to help school systems learn— have facilitated organizational learning in school systems across North America. Our findings suggest that successful educators neither faithfully implemented nor rejected CID methods. Rather, they engaged in a constant negotiation between more orderly and disorderly approaches to organizational learning.

Authors

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Radford University

• Jal David Mehta, Harvard University

• Amelia Peterson, Harvard University

• James Jack, Harvard University

• Kim Frumin, Harvard University

• Rebecca Horwitz-Willis, Harvard University