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The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

This chapter concerns itself primarily with questions of how students in higher education studies can best acquire, apply, create, and share knowledge. Over the past several decades, multiple forms of active learning have been proposed in order to increase student engagement and deepen their understanding. This chapter, accordingly, examines the epistemological claims of the supporters and detractors of active learning while simultaneously exploring the nascence and development of some of the major understandings which presently underpin an epistemology of active learning. While the focus of earlier works may have been on changes that higher education instructors should make to improve student understanding of key STEM concepts, this chapter addresses changes in the roles of both students and instructors as the co-creators of active learning environments and learning communities. A particular focus is given to the significance of metacognition as a critical skill that enables students to assess their own learning and also critically assess sources of information. The chapter includes a framework which indicates trends toward high-impact active learning skills for students in STEM higher education and the research which theorizes and supports these new instructional imperatives.

The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in education is increasingly gaining importance in institutions of higher education. Operationally, ICT has helped to cut costs and speed up transactions by streamlining and automating processes. Pedagogically, it has enabled online, hybrid, and technology enhanced learning as well as a host of other capabilities, from learning management systems to student information system, and from student affairs to academic affairs. ICT is now embedded in every aspect of university life. The role of ICT is found to increase the value of classroom delivery, it has helped in the growth of research, expanding horizons for students mainly with limited accessibility to education and it has created an overall positive impact in the teaching–learning environment in general. There are always two sides to the coin and in this case inaccessibility, economic disparity, and ineffective implementation of ICT has also created impediments for effectively adopting and diffusing integration of ICT into pedagogy. This volume is a collection of interventions and collaborative practices across the world that showcases the multifaceted ways of how various institutions have been engaged in supporting teaching and learning with the use of technology and how it is equipping our future generation with the skills required to face a changing job market.

Evaluation is the process by which we estimate how things should go, explore how things are going, and determine how things went in terms of course redesign. In this chapter, we examine formative and summative methods for assessing student learning and establishing teacher effectiveness and course quality. Evaluation is a subjective, value-laden process. To introduce the rigor needed to make it meaningful, evaluation should be multifaceted, planned in advance, made transparent to learners, and employ valid and reliable methods. Moving courses online presents both opportunities and challenges for evaluation. We explore ways to implement assessment to make full use of the advantages of technology while mitigating the problems associated with online delivery.

In the light of the financial crisis and the radically changed conditions in the market place, international leadership development is facing new demands. The Danish-based International Leadership Institute Mannaz has researched the new conditions in collaboration with the Institute of Executive Development in the United States.

The research, conducted in 2008 and 2009, combines, in an innovative way, quantitative and qualitative inputs, from both current and future perspectives, from some 111 senior Corporate Executives, Heads of Human Resources and of Learning and Organisational Development in large international corporations headquartered in Europe and the United States; together with the thoughts of some 50 experienced practitioners involved in executive coaching as well as in designing, developing and facilitating leadership development programmes. Also we include a section summarising the key findings from recently published research from other leadership development surveys. Conclusions reveal that the crisis has propelled a long-awaited decline of the traditional classroom-based educational approach to leadership development. Instead, effective leadership development is suggested to build on experiential learning approaches rooted in real life, real time and allowing for more immediate impact and providing for considerably higher relevance and motivation. Coaching, leaders teaching leaders, stretch assignments, action learning, peer networking, customer insights and selective use of technology are seen as important contributors to the leadership development process going forward.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

Black males often are raised in poverty, exposed to violence and toxic environments that create different levels of trauma that can cause social emotional problems which lead to mental health problems. These problems along with a lack of adequate relationships with teachers can affect their schooling and attainment. No wonder, black males often suffer disproportionately from poor achievement, high suspension, exclusions, and drop-out rates. Young people who struggle in school often lack the social and emotional skills (or “soft skills”) needed to succeed academically, deal with anger, make sound choices, and handle challenging situations constructively, ethically, and manage behaviors that prevent them from being suspended/excluded from school. It does not help that teachers who are often afraid of them, and do not know how to relate to them and lack emotional literacy (EL) themselves. Unfortunately, because of these challenges schools will often place black males in special education classes.

There is a cognitive/non-cognitive divide in education. Most of the school curriculum/pedagogy focus on cognitive aspects of education/learning (e.g., memory-based education) when compared to non-cognitive aspects of learning (social and emotional skills/learning). If our young people are to realize their full potential in our schools, it is crucial we begin educating the “whole child” and increase social and emotional provisions in our schools. It is the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of learning combined that make young people successful. We need a new educational paradigm/mind shift. After all, educating the whole child makes good sense of course, all learning has an emotional base.

While there has been a proliferation of social and emotional learning programs in schools in recent years, social and emotional learning programs that focus on black males and cultural competence are limited. Therefore, we propose a new framework for social and emotional development/learning model for black males that focus on cultural competence. Our EL/cultural competence model is called teacher empathy, which focuses on relationship black males have with their teachers and therefore focuses on both the pupil/student EL and the teachers. The aim/goal of our model/curriculum is to: improve academic performance, motivate and help both black males and teachers, regulate and manage their behaviors more effectively, and reduce suspensions, exclusions, and drop-outs.

In this chapter we detail our understandings of inclusive pedagogical practices that enable all students to assemble complex literate repertoires. We discuss generative concepts from international related literature (e.g. Au, Dyson, Janks, Luke, McNaughton, Moll, Thomson). We then present descriptions of two lessons as examples of how inclusive pedagogical practices might look in primary and secondary classrooms. The focus will be on how texts work to represent the world in particular ways and not others – and the implications of this for the inclusion of diverse student cohorts in developing complex literate repertoires.