I began a self-study of my learning organization’s growth and flexibility, in hopes to better understand and articulate challenges we faced in adapting new educational paradigms and standards. These postings cover not only the daily occurrences at my college of education, but also some of the experiences I have had while working at other organizations. If you have questions or thoughts please email me at nsabir@indiana.edu.
Institutes of education managing change and shift: A reflective piece utilizing Daft’s framework (part III)
Bias, mission & goals
I think the “most dangerous” of biases Daft discusses is, seeing what you want to see: Not because you truly want to “see” something, but rather because the information we gather, interpret and present to others is constantly shaped by our epistemological and ontological underpinnings. I’m stealing this story from a workshop I ran while working with Organization D.
So, Organization D’s mission statement is something along the lines of a peaceful world and each department has specific/specialized goals targeted at regions or themes. The organization’s goal doesn’t face conflicting departmental goals so much as the message gets lost in all the moving parts and sometimes there are not clear guidelines. On September 21, Peace Day, K-12 educators tackle teaching complex issues of global conflicts and cultural awareness often using social media and synchronous technologies. A couple of years ago there were not too many model schools for this initiative, and teachers dreamt up great projects for their students to do. One the more common examples was Skyping/email a classroom across the world and then reflecting about the experience. In some cases the lack of organizational support/resources lead to a propagation of negative stereotypes, especially at the k-5 level (“Japanese people know origami.” “Koreans eat dogs and that is gross!” “Baby girls are killed because parents want a son.” and “Peace means you can travel wherever you want.” – Just to name a few that were brought up at this workshop). As teachers began to post their students’ work on online forums the banter began about how irresponsible the teachers and Organization D had been to allow students to internalize stereotypes that could lead to conflict.
I think that sometimes working with an organization’s mission statement can be a game of Telephone particularly when they are broad and allow departments a little too much freedom. While having a broad mission statement can be great because it allows you to cover a lot of ground, different parts need to certain have specific objectives that support the official goal.
In many of teams I have worked on, the problem is rather apparent, there is a ____ need and the difficulties lie in crafting solutions. Often times the problem is over simplified by managers, as they are not the individuals placed in the field and their foundation for identifying and understanding the problem is relayed through secondary channels. Because the services the organizations deliver are so embedded in in-country dynamics that crafting solutions becomes a greater focus. Our organizations proposed solutions and timelines are also heavily impacted by major stakeholders – so it becomes a bit of a juggling act.
In our case, because the focus is shifted towards finding a sustainable and compatible solutions for all parties the identification of the issue at hand tends to get brushed over. In the past I have seen this lead to all sorts of communication-based issues, loss of funding, misusing fiscal and time based resources, and I’ve even see projects fail shortly after the first round of evaluations.
While the analytical and researcher based curriculum team I work with attempts to institute changes leveraging an incremental decision model, where instructional concepts are put through an iterative development process to ensure a best fit, this far from what actually happens. In the past four years each terms begins with the goal of trying to replicate a systematic and incremental decision process yet after a couple of weeks that fades away. Because the curriculum development team has to account for student (user) diversity and variation in needs, and constant flux in environmental factors a garbage can model would be more appropriate. Throw into the mix that we have a 60% instructor turnover, annually, and retaining structure can become problematic. Overarching goals are ill-defined, and problems and solutions are often identified vague and attended to simultaneously leading to additional problems. More often than not our team crafts “solutions” for problems which don’t exist and may not even be an issue, and major problems are sometimes pushed to the side for another term (another batch to deal with). Do I think this is effective? No. However, it is the culture of my organization and my mangers’ preferred style to allow for a more organic approach.
It is far too easy to go along with a group or majority decision. This happens a bit differently in my team. We currently have 1 very hands off manager and 11 instructor-designers, who have equal say in how we facilitate our programme. While there are some team players that naturally take a more leadership role and others who are more outspoken about distinct issues, a groupthink mentality is often applied to major decisions. Now this isn’t because of a lack of expertise or diversity but rather an understanding of “let’s agree to disagree” and if we continue to “disagree” the team isn’t nearly as productive, if at all.
Fin.
Najia's Reflexivity Archive (Status: Hiatus) 