In these times of restructuring and reconversion of the school system inherited from modernity, schools are forced to learn to respond to the demands of an uncertain, turbulent, unstable environment, without expecting or relying on structural reforms. In this way, it is intended to favor, instead of bureaucratic, vertical or rational strategies of change, the emergence of autonomous dynamics of change, which can return the protagonism to the agents and, therefore, could have a greater degree of permanence. In these coordinates the model of learning organizations (learning organization, in the original terminology) is inscribed - and can be productive. I have warned on other occasions (Bolívar, 2000a) of the need to properly situate this proposal,so that it can stimulate improvement initiatives, instead of distracting us with novel theories that leave reality intact. A promising image of the future like this has to take into account both the realities from which we started and where we want to go.
A wide literature has dealt with this topic, coming from the field of business organization and management; starting to apply to schools (Fullan, 1993; Dalin and Rolff, 1993; Leithwood and Louis, 1998, Leithwood, 2000; Senge and others, 2000). Therefore, it is time to ask ourselves in what sense it is coherent to pretend that educational centers are organizations that learn, so as to avoid relapsing into mistakes made with previous transfers of strategies from the business environment.
In some cases, they were left as forward runaways that left things as they were while entertaining staff; in others, in orientations that led to the dismantling, rather than promoting, the public school.
In a recent book - "Schools as Learning Organizations" - in addition to exposing some of the relevant dimensions of organizational learning with a broad review of what we know on the subject, I have specifically posed this question. I consider, on the one hand, that we need an educational reconstruction of the model; as Hargreaves (1998: 23) says, "we have to renew the very concept of organizational learning so that it better fits the reality of public school." On the other, in the face of the serious crisis in change management strategies, the theory of learning organizations offers a relevant and promising framework, provided that its limitations (internal and external) in its application to public schools are not forgotten. Therefore,I have allowed myself to subtitle the aforementioned book with promise and realities. The promising vision for the schools of the future must be contrasted with the realities, so as not to naively believe that we can - or, even more, that it is desirable - to have “Toyota schools”.
After having recognized the schools, with their own culture and organizational specificity, retracing the path, we can fall back on resorting to the most "advanced" modes of organization in other areas, believing that, for this reason, they are more "progressive". Is there anything else that makes organizational learning and Learning Organizations theory relevant? I think so, on condition of knowing how to rebuild the idea and the model in an educational way (for example, as a «professional learning community»), thus taking due concern so that it can contribute to promoting the organizational development of the centers.
Miguel Ángel Santos (2000), in order to obviate this problem (duly transposing the business approach to the school), adopts a particular approach: starting from how a school as an institution could adopt ways of working that contribute to learning. Hence, without neglecting to go to what these non-educational perspectives may have contributed, it is directed preferably to the literature of a collegiate education, which promotes professional development in a collective way. The school, as a critical learning community, is a joint project of action, in an environment of practical deliberation and collaboration, which does not exclude dissent or conflict.
At the end of the day, the image of an educational center as an organization that learns was present when the centers were conceived as basic units of training and innovation, with research processes, cooperative action. That book by Dalin and Rust (1983), with the provocative title Can schools learn ?, already translated the idea from Organizational Development, which the author himself (Dalin and Rolff, 1993) has commissioned after highlighting. A systemic vision of change, institutional self-evaluation as the basis of the improvement process, importance of working together, learning in the work process, change as learning, mobilizing the internal energy of the organization, etc.; are common ideas in educational change movements (effective schools, school improvement,restructuring) and in the Learning Organizations proposal. In that sense, it has nothing new, connecting with the pedagogical renewal movements.
We know that it is virtually impossible to create and maintain over time conditions for good learning for students when they do not exist for their teachers. But school institutions are designed, in their basic grammatical rules of operation, so that students learn, not so that those who work in them learn to do better. As, in a similar way, Escudero (2001: 32) has said: «as long as we do not assume, inside and outside, that the centers have to be rebuilt, neither their learning, nor that of the teachers, nor that of the students, can ».
When does an organization learn?
An organization learns when, by having optimized the training potential of the processes that take place within it, it acquires a qualifying function for those who work in it, while being attentive to respond to external demands and changes. In this sense, it institutionalizes improvement (organizational learning) as a permanent process, growing as an organization. As Nancy Dixon (1994) puts it, learning organizations "make intentional use of learning processes at the individual, group, and system levels to transform the organization in ways that progressively satisfy all concerned." It highlights four central aspects: the intentional (and not only natural) character, how it should happen at all organizational levels,the self-transformation of the organization and its impact on all those involved (internal and external).
Peter Senge (1992), in a best-seller that contributed to popularize the term, spoke of the fact that Learning Organizations have institutionalized processes of reflection and institutional learning in the planning and evaluation of their actions, acquiring a new competence (learning how to learn); which implies transforming current "mental models", as well as generating "shared visions." Chris Argyris (1993), for his part, stressed that organizational learning implies the ability to learn from mistakes, providing - instead of adaptation - new solutions, by alteration, in a double and not a simple cycle, of mental frameworks. in which its action has worked so far. Thus, a Learning Organization is one that has a new competence;that enables them to -learning collegially from past and present experience- process information, correct mistakes, and solve their problems in a creative or transformative way, not merely cumulative or reproductive.
Drawing on the literature in the field and on their experiences working with companies, Pearn et al. (1995) present a six-factor model, as large components of OA. The model also makes it possible to assess each component according to the degree to which an organization is, being able to represent an initial graphic map of its state.
- People as apprentices. Employees as a whole are motivated to continually learn, to learn from experience, and committed to the self-development of the organization. Supportive culture. Culture that supports continuous learning, promotes change of the status quo, questioning assumptions and established ways of doing things. Vision for learning. Shared vision that includes the organization's ability to identify, respond and see its future possibilities. This vision also includes recognizing the importance at all levels of the organization to continuously self-transform itself, in a way that allows it to survive in an unpredictable context. Increased learning.The organization has structured processes and strategies to increase and sustain learning among all employees. Management support. Managers genuinely believe that encouraging and supporting learning leads to better competencies and outcomes than today; Therefore, instead of controlling, they facilitate and support this line (Bolívar, 2000b, 2001). Transformative structure. The organization expands the ways in which it is structured and operates to facilitate learning across different levels, functions and subsystems, and enables rapid adaptation to change. It is organized to encourage and reward innovation, learning and development.Instead of controlling, they facilitate and support this line (Bolívar, 2000b, 2001). Transformative structure. The organization expands the ways in which it is structured and operates to facilitate learning across different levels, functions and subsystems, and enables rapid adaptation to change. It is organized to encourage and reward innovation, learning and development.Instead of controlling, they facilitate and support this line (Bolívar, 2000b, 2001). Transformative structure. The organization expands the ways in which it is structured and operates to facilitate learning across different levels, functions and subsystems, and enables rapid adaptation to change. It is organized to encourage and reward innovation, learning and development.
Although every organization - naturally or implicitly - learns, qualifying it as a Learning Organization means that it increases its learning capacity with a degree of added value: increased professional and personal capacities of the members, new working methods or specific knowledge, and growth of expectations of survival and development of the organization, due to its better results and image, or capacity to adapt to the changing environment. Between learning by knowing how to use accumulated experience and exploring new actions responding in an innovative way, the learning of the organization is at stake.
The school as a learning organization
I have extensively described in the cited book (Bolívar, 2000a) the functioning of organizational learning (organizational memory, organizational culture and learning, or knowledge management), as well as the processes required for the acquisition of knowledge and its dissemination and use. It is more important to me, to highlight now, a possible representation of a learning school (see Figure), which I have made based on Dalin and Rolff (1993).
Generating new competencies in the members of an organization involves - like two sides of the same coin - the experience of a qualifying or training activity, and that the organization as a whole carries out joint projects that contribute to learning. Increasing and using all the learning potential of individuals and groups, in a climate of continuous learning and improvement, is typical of an organization that has placed learning as its main asset and value. Organizational learning is not the cumulative sum of individual learning; There have to be dense networks of collaboration between the members because, in the absence of exchange of experiences and ideas, it will not happen.
The educational center as a learning organization
Figure: The educational center as a learning organization
In each angle of Figure 1 there are four conditions required to promote organizational learning in a school. The top two (changes in the environment and in educational policy) referred to external factors; the lower ones (previous developmental experience, and school history and culture), to intra-organizational factors. For the internal processes of Figure 1 to take place, on the one hand, there must be mutual and open relationships with these factors, while promoting - or at least not preventing - the development of the organization.
A key to starting the process is that the educational center is immersed in integrated and shared development programs. If there are no joint work projects, there is no basis for organizational learning. These presuppose, as the Figure indicates, a shared acceptance of visions and needs, which must -then- be the first point of action and, in turn, cause a change in the school culture (for example, of individualism). Just then, one can speak of organization development, which when it becomes institutionalized, through internal processes and sets of self-review and action plans for development, would lead to getting closer to a learning organization. The process takes time to develop this shared vision,by means of collective self-review processes that allow to give rise to a collective learning process, where the institutional self-evaluation process acquires, at the same time, training potentialities for the agents.
The learning of the organization, as a whole, falls between a double level: (a) Teachers as learners: processes that individuals use to learn in the organization. A wide body of knowledge has highlighted conditions and forms that increase professional competencies. Although without individual learning there can be no institutional learning, the first does not guarantee the second: if individual interactions do not occur in communities of practice. The coordination and transfer of individual learning capitalizes on the potential of the organization.
(b) Learning in groups and teams: the theory of distributed cognition (Salomon, 1998) explains well how knowledge can be distributed among groups. Each member of the group specializes in a function that is passed to the group and, in that sense, the total capacity of the group is distributed among the members. The contextual relationships in which members work, cooperating around common projects in professional communities, are equally highly relevant.
The learning of the organization as a whole is the most complex and difficult to explain. The usual way is to transfer individual learning modes to the organization as a metaphor: how does the organization store and access knowledge? What forms of procedural knowledge are more functional? How do organizations perceive, filter, process and store information in long-term memory? In a book on the subject (Bolívar, 2000a) we have given an account and reviewed the matter. But it seems clear that organizational learning transcends the sum of individual learning. It begins to occur within groups working collaboratively, as members mutually confronting problems and developing solutions.The lessons learned through problem solving become part of the school culture and, as such, are passed on from the group to new members.
Furthermore, we cannot ignore the incentives for an organization to learn. Much literature on this field (Leithwood, 2000) foregrounds the demands and pressures of the environment as a factor that forces the organization to learn to respond to them or, at least, accommodate them. Likewise, that the organization as a whole perceives an imbalance between what it intends to do and what it is actually achieving or is being demanded, for example, in student results. A certain ethic of continuous improvement is ultimately the source of organizational learning.
In addition, organizations do not learn by learning, but the very objective of schools is that they have a positive impact, at the classroom and school level, on the educational experiences of students. Redesigning the organizational structure and relationships between teachers and teams is not enough if it does not contribute to improving results and increasing student commitment to learning. The current environment of competitive inter-center pressures for the effectiveness of the school has placed, in the foreground, this dimension that will ultimately determine whether the organization is learning or not.
Business origin of learning organizations
Learning organizations have been treated from various disciplinary perspectives. While some (sociology, organizational development or science of action) emphasize the internal development dimension of the organization; Others, more managerial (management science, production strategies), emphasize learning based on the demands of the environment, judging said organizational learning to be more efficient than its competitors, or to adapt quickly to changes in the environment. The organizations that learn do not hide that such learning is marked by the context (competitive, customer demands, educational policy, etc.), which will determine if one school progresses more than another, within a conception of the organization as a system open to the environment.
As open systems, organizations have to be sensitive to the environment, to learn how to reorganize, reduce costs, innovate or create new products to gain competition; in short, acquiring the ability to progressively adapt to an unpredictable future. Therefore, it is good for business or commercial models and they have this heavy burden to transplant to educational. Schools, to a large extent, do not fit this model. Precisely, trends of the last decade such as School Based Management and School Restructuring aim to make them more vulnerable to the environment, which implies decentralizing and deregulating the system.
Indeed, within the new, more subtle approaches to business management in leading companies, it is intended to achieve the commitment of workers with the goals of the organization, through a decentralization of management, increasing the autonomy of the centers, while promoting professional communities with shared values and goals. In moments of withdrawal and recession in the role of the State in education, a new public management tries to energize the organizations of the second sector (public) with management modes imitated from the organizations of the first sector (commercial). The local capacity of those involved is used to self-organize: to have organizations where individuals, in a climate of dedication, trust and commitment,they achieve the best of their abilities with minimal supervision.
The theories of «learning organizations» have, then, their origin in the new paradigms of understanding of organizations and of post-Fordist organization (decentralized and flexible) of work, and as such comes from non-educational fields (Motorola, Microsoft, or Shell). In this case, as happened with Organizational Development (OD), we are faced with the problem of making possible unfounded transplants from the business sector to school organizations, described as "managerial" (management). Instead, we propose to choose to return to those interesting elements of this theory and practice, duly reconceptualized, so that it does not become a new "technification" of the organizational processes and, instead,can revitalize educational change strategies and ways of thinking educational establishments as organizations.
In what sense can schools be learning organizations?
At a time when the rational planning and management of change processes has failed, it is resorted to transforming organizations through self-development processes, which have a degree of permanence and not merely episodic. On the other hand, it is no longer possible to be insensitive to the pressures of the environment, trusting that those involved themselves determine the possible improvement. Uncertain conditions, unstable environments and environmental pressures are undoubtedly forcing organizations to have to learn to face new challenges if they do not want to submit to the laws of natural selection.
We have learned, in the last third of the century, that a permanent educational change depends, not so much on favoring its implementation of educational change or on the meaning that agents give it, but on promoting the proactive (non-reactive) learning capacity of schools as organizations. This is the appeal of the theory of learning organizations, in a postmodern context where the bureaucratic structures and rules of modernity are mistrusted, in order to place -in their place- the processes and relationships that enable self-organization. Vertebrate horizontally in an "organic" way, once the vertical articulation has not worked, seems to be the direction, in a post-bureaucratic design. "From this perspective," say Leithwood and Louis (1998: 3),"The image of schools as learning organizations appears to be a promising response to the continuing demands for reconversion."
Instead of taking Learning Organizations as a mere management strategy, I have defended understanding it as a guiding framework for the development of organizations. It is not a model with a referential meaning to be implemented in fact, believing that educational centers can become "intelligent organizations"; but, rather, a counterfactual model that provides ideas, processes and strategies to guide how schools can learn, while explaining why, on many occasions, they do not. Peter Senge (1999) affirms, in this sense, that Learning Organizations are just that: an idea, which can contribute to maximizing organizations' capacity to learn. In fact,Empirical research on Learning Organizations is very meager (almost nil in the educational field), which shows that it is more of a development ideal than something to be fully implemented in an observable reality.
Therefore, in order not to be deceived, it is convenient to give it the status of expressing a vision or ideal of development, which contributes both to generating (or increasing) the capacity of organizations to learn, and to judge -contrafactically- to what degree a workplace it approaches, to a greater or lesser degree, this ideal situation. Understanding it in this way means that it is not intended, in the first order, to materialize them in the tangible reality of each center, but to serve as a criterion to judge the existing realities, at the same time as to guide processes that are closer to said model.
In this way, it contributes to questioning why, in fact, schools do not usually learn and what should be done to do so. This prevents speaking, in a referential sense, of educational centers as "intelligent organizations", in order - instead - to understand them as a "generative" (non-descriptive) idea, which Senge says, an expression of a vision of what education should be. reality, capable of generating a process of continuous change and self-transformation of the organization. The translation that we have adopted in Spanish (Learning Organizations), in this sense, is fortunate: it expresses an idea of a process without a final end, which can progressively lead to modifications in cognitive dimensions and actions. As Pearn et al. (1995), we are not sure that there is such a thing as "the" learning organization.Rather, there are organizations that - in a relational and developmental sense, not an end-state sense - learn and grow more than others.
Educational reconstruction and relevance for educational change
If the Learning Organizations model can be rebuilt educationally as professional communities, this is not enough to forget the burdens that it carries, depending on its origin: the stimulus to learn is not only a genuine force from within, it is motivated by the competitive context and changing. I have carefully analyzed (Bolívar, 2000a) the problems and serious limitations that its transfer to educational centers presents.
A necessary educational reconstruction of this model goes through some principles such as the following: the market cannot mark learning, but internal criteria of valuable educational practice; organizational learning should be an incentive for the school community to get involved in the design of the center, rather than just choosing it; promote shared leadership, giving prominence and control to those involved over their destiny and their immediate environment.
Going to the theories of learning organizations can lead us to look the other way, leaping into the void in the face of current problems. Thus, when we have pending issues such as guaranteeing good schools for everyone (Darling-Hammond, 2001), we can fall into new management theories that, on the one hand, support the de-accountability of public powers in education; on the other, they distract us from relevant issues. However, it is also true, without an effort from the centers in education that are in charge, we can go very far.
The Learning Organizations model is a suggestive line, in the current conjuncture, to point out new paths for the development of educational centers, but -we believe- it must be duly rebuilt educatively so that it can contribute to mark a path to guide the changes educational at this time of the end of the millennium and the beginning of the new century. It is about providing visions of a "good" school and providing processes that could lead to what we want.
However, the daily life of the educational centers tends to pass, year after year, without giving rise to an institutional learning that, duly settled in its organizational memory, could both have its own history, so as not to always start over, and get involved in continuous learning. Meanwhile, as Fullan has said, "That schools should become learning organizations is a happy statement, but a distant dream." The irony of school reality is that they are institutions dedicated to learning and they do not usually learn themselves. Schools are not usually, due to their own structural conditions, organizations suitable for lifelong learning. Conceive the center as an institutional learning community, apart from some of the internal processes described,It requires restructuring the organizational contexts of teachers' work.
As MA Santos (2000) points out, there are a series of obstacles that block school learning: routinization of professional practices, lack of coordination of professionals, bureaucratization of changes, fearful supervision, managerial direction, excessive centralization, overcrowding of students, demotivation of teachers, union action only demanding, among others. The author understands that the key obstacle to the lack of institutional learning is closure (personal, institutional, and strategic or of the system) as an attitude of not being open to criticism, to the new, to learning.
The image of learning organizations evokes, from the outset, assumptions about the members of the school as committed, participatory people, who pursue common purposes and, as such, strive to progressively develop more effective ways of achieving such goals, responding to demands. the environment. Instead of other more managerial models, an organization that learns requires training, increased professionalism and intellectual growth of its members, as well as their participation in actions, if the center wants to grow as an organization. Warning about the possible uncritical uses of the image does not mean giving up the role it can play in improving education.
Bibliographic references
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