ABSTRACT
In the era of No Child Left Behind, ‘school turnaround’ became a national industry. In the early 1970s, a young researcher hired by the Rand Corporation began studying the implementation of four, federally-funded school innovation programs. This chapter introduces several approaches to organizational learning. Each one has been thoughtfully refined over years of widespread use in schools. Complexity research, as reported by K. Dooley in the same article, has found that institutions with a strong organizational identity tend to produce within individuals a powerful framework for understanding the surrounding environment. Crucial to the development of organizational learning were the twin notions of “single” and “double-loop” learning pioneered by Chris Argyris. An organization could learn, and learning could become a deliberate, ongoing enterprise. Central to organizational learning is collaboration. But collaboration is a kind of black box, as mysterious as it is widely invoked. There are many ways to cultivate a learning community.
