Search results

The paper aims to describe the application of theoretical principles derived from a study of self‐organisation and complex systems theory and their application to school‐based capacity building to support planned change.

The paper employs a case example in a Hong Kong School to illustrate the application of the principles and discuss their potential to sustain the effect of capacity building in schools.. The descriptive case study is used to illustrate six theoretical propositions of self‐organization. The case is then unpacked using each of the propositions to illustrate the application of the theory to capacity building in a secondary school setting.

The case illustrates the way each of the principles are reflected in a design process undertaken by the school's principal and its leadership team to create a self‐organizing approach to capacity building.

The value of this paper is threefold. First it shows the way in which capacity building can be theorized for practical benefit in school settings. Second, the theoretical approach described in the case study addresses the longstanding and largely unresolved issue of the sustainability of capacity building efforts in school settings. The case analysis links theory to practical strategy that can be used by school leaders to design their own capacity building efforts that disperse control to the community, are sustainable, and self‐organizing within the school.

Describes a range of contexts associated with the learning organization literature and the job of learning organization leader. Offers prescriptions about how classically administered productivity improvement might be implemented in organizations, on the one hand, and how self‐organizing, learning networks might be facilitated, on the other. Also examines the problems and leadership challenges associated with organizationally destructive learning communities.

At a time when many education systems are grappling with the issue of school reform, there is a concern that traditional UK secondary schools are organised in a way that makes them unable to respond to increasingly complex environmental demands. This research-based paper uses complexity theory to gauge the organisational differences between (1) the traditional model of schooling based on same-age organisation and (2) a form of organisation based on multi-age tutor groups, one that schools call a vertical tutoring (VT) system. The intention is to highlight the organisational changes made by schools that choose to transition from their same-age iteration to the VT system, and expose organisational assumptions in the dominant same-age structure that may account for the failure of reform.

The author's consultancy and research work spans two decades, and includes around 200 UK secondary schools, and others in China, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Qatar, Germany and Colombia. This conceptual paper draws on the recorded discourse and critical reflections of leadership teams during programmes of transformative learning, the process involved in the transition from one system to another. Using descriptions of school organisation abstracted from the complexity literature, differences in the two models not otherwise apparent, come into sharp focus. These not only reveal a substantive connection between organisation, complexity, and individual and organisational learning, but offer insights into the challenge of school reform.

Same-age organisations act in ways that regulate and restrict the agency of participating actors (staff, students and parents). The effect is to reduce a school’s learning capacity and ability to absorb the value demand on its system. Such a system is closed and non-complex. VT schools construct an open and fluid learning system from the base, deregulating agency. By unfreezing their structure, they intervene in processes of power, necessitating the distribution of leadership to the organisational edge, a process of complexification. The form of organisation chosen by a school explains the failure of reform.

Insights from VT schools cast considerable doubt on the viability of traditional same-age structures to serve complex societies and communities, while highlighting the critical role played by complexity theory in organisational praxis. If correct, the current emphasis on teacher “will and skill”, curricular editing, pedagogy and the “what works agenda” will be insufficient to bring about reformational change and more likely to contribute to systemic stasis.

The purpose of this study is to present and compare the results of an evaluation of two self‐organizing map (SOM) models' suitability for financial environment analysis. The models are constructed for analyzing the macro‐ and firm‐level environments in the international pulp and paper industry.

The data for the evaluation were collected through a field survey in 13 publicly‐noted Finnish companies, with a total of 36 respondents. All the respondents were involved in business intelligence or corporate development related tasks.

The results indicate that, the respondents appreciated the capabilities of both SOM models. All of the factors relating to accuracy, content, format, timeliness, and usability for strategic decision making received ratings higher than neutral. Respondents also concluded that the SOM models have additional benefits compared to currently used methods. Finally, the respondents were willing to utilize the SOM as a complement to other tools for analyzing the competitive environment. Some subfactors of the firm level SOM model received statistically higher averages than the macro‐level SOM model.

Despite the SOM having been utilized in thousands of different applications, user satisfaction with the SOM and its information products has not previously been widely evaluated, especially not by potential end‐users.

The purpose of this essay is to honor, position and reflect on key themes related to high school reform within the careerlong scholarship of Karen Seashore Louis. It is presented in relation to my own and others' key studies and book-length arguments regarding educational change, knowledge utilization, professional communities and innovation, over the past 30 years and up to the present time.

The article examines and interprets major works by Karen Seashore Louis and other educational change theorists that address repeated systemic failures, and episodic outlier efforts, at transformational change in high schools.

High school change has only failed if it is judged by the overarching criterion of system-wide transformation. Fair assessments of high school change must also examine accumulated incremental innovations. In light of the need for transformational aspirations in schools to mesh with transformational directions in society, the global pandemic and its aftermath may provide five key opportunities for long-awaited transformation.

There are different levels and degrees of innovation. Incremental innovation is as important as wholesale transformation. The growing number of networked outliers of innovation raises questions about the false equation of whole system change with bureaucratic state reform. Although the influential literature on whole system change is rooted in a small number of English-speaking countries, transformational change on a system-wide basis already exists in Northern Europe and parts of the Global South. Last, the pandemic and other major disruptions to the global social order have produced conditions that are highly favorable to transformational change in the future.

This paper aims at identifying factors that could contribute to the motivation of students in sustainable development (SD) education. The underlying idea of the paper is that SD education is not always as attractive among students and lecturers as many would like it to be.

The paper briefly reviews literature regarding behavioral change for long-term benefits. It identifies four motivators that could be effective to make people pursue longer-term objectives. It identifies if these motivators were present in five cases of successful SD education.

The four motivators for students that were identified in the literature review (a sense of autonomy, a challenge of reflection on the future role, connection with others, self-fulfillment, focus on the individual learning need) could be observed in the cases of successful SD education, although to various degrees. Individual autonomy in learning was not observed, but group autonomy was present in all cases.

The case studies were all electives. It is unclear how the motivators could work out in mandatory courses. Moreover, the curriculum as a whole will affect the success of single courses. Successful courses being “the exception” of the curriculum might be judged differently if they would be part of the curriculum in which such courses would be the main stream. Further research is required to check if the motivators are effective in mandatory and not specifically SD-targeted courses. It is also not clear how various motivators could be applied most effectively in a curriculum.

The paper gives guidance to lecturers and educational managers to design attractive and effective SD education.

The paper treats SD education from a novel perspective: how to convey a credible behavioral message, and how to motivate students for education for SD.

The purpose of this paper is to generate customer clusters using self-organizing map (SOM) approach, a machine learning technique with a big data set of credit card consumptions. The authors aim to use the consumption patterns of the customers in a period of three months deducted from the credit card transactions, specifically the consumption categories (e.g. food, entertainment, etc.).

The authors use a big data set of almost 40,000 credit card transactions to cluster customers. To deal with the size of the data set and the eliminated the required parametric assumptions the authors use a machine learning technique, SOMs. The variables used are grouped into three as demographical variables, categorical consumption variables and summary consumption variables. The variables are first converted to factors using principal component analysis. Then, the number of clusters is specified by k-means clustering trials. Then, clustering with SOM is conducted by only including the demographical variables and all variables. Then, a comparison is made and the significance of the variables is examined by analysis of variance.

The appropriate number of clusters is found to be 8 using k-means clusters. Then, the differences in categorical consumption levels are investigated between the clusters. However, they have been found to be insignificant, whereas the summary consumption variables are found to be significant between the clusters, as well as the demographical variables.

The originality of the study is to incorporate the credit card consumption variables of customers to cluster the bank customers. The authors use a big data set and dealt with it with a machine learning technique to deduct the consumption patterns to generate the clusters. Credit card transactions generate a vast amount of data to deduce valuable information. It is mainly used to detect fraud in the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, consumption patterns obtained from credit card transaction are first used for clustering the customers in this study.

While scholars recognize that parent engagement in children’s education is beneficial, much of the normative parent involvement literature rests on the assumption that marginalized parents of color must be taught white middle-class norms of conduct in order to engage with the school system. In this chapter, we describe the ways our critical ethnographic implementation and analysis of the Parent Mentor Program – a parent engagement project in a small urban school district in Central New York – re-envisions parent engagement in three interrelated ways. First, we argue that the project is race-, class-, gender-, and power-conscious, drawing on the interrelated theoretical frames of Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies. Second, we argue that the program and research are unique in utilizing the toolkit of critical ethnography to not merely describe, but also to intervene in educational inequity. Third, we argue that the program has a more holistic goal than much of the parent engagement literature, as it seeks to connect parent engagement and activism with the larger antiracist goal of using restorative justice strategies to disrupt the disproportionate disciplining of Black students. Focusing on critical ethnographic methods in practice, we analyze the shifting positionalities of a multiracial research team as we grappled with methodological dilemmas in the first three years of the program. We document how we balanced the goals of introducing a race-conscious framework and catalyzing critical consciousness with the realities of constantly renegotiating entry in a school district characterized by colorblindness and colormuteness.

Despite the existence of legislation and policy, the inclusion of students with special needs remains a challenge for teachers when research-based pedagogies and collaboration are not translated into practice. Given emerging Indexes for inclusion, perhaps we should be attending to measuring school and classroom indicators of inclusive education to allow for professional development for teachers in an empirical and guided manner. Following a brief introduction to the importance of inclusive practice in schools, this chapter will address teacher use of research-based pedagogies and curriculum differentiation required to enhance success with students in schools; teachers’ capacity to communicate about learning using professional language and collaborative problem-solving processes; teachers’ sense of self-efficacy when working with students who have special needs; and translation of these research-based skills into actual classroom practice.