Mal Lee and Roger Broadie
Schools, more than ever have to take charge of their own growth and evolution (Lee 2015) – Taking Charge of Your School’s Evolution – http://teacher.acer.edu.au/article/taking-charge-of-your-schools-evolution
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Only those within each unique school setting can hope to understand the intimate workings of that school and the myriad variables – human and technological – to be addressed in growing the school.
That said the research on the digital evolution of schooling, and on the digital transformation of organisations reveals the very considerable common traits of evolving digitally based operations, and that schools globally will move through the same evolutionary stages and display at each stage a suite of common attributes.
The imperative is that each school takes operational responsibility for its growth and evolution, learns from the digital transformation research and the pathfinder school and adopts a development strategy appropriate and suit of performance indicators for it’s unique setting, mix of staff, community, shaping vision and state of digital evolution.
It is folly in 2016 for schools to wait for the educational bureaucracy to grow the school.
Sadly too many schools are still doing just that, following the management dictates of their education authority, seemingly unwilling to vary the status quo, placing the continued relevance and viability of the school at risk
Bureaucracies as an organisational form are designed to manage operations (Lipnack and Stamps, 1994). They are incapable of handling the speed and uncertainty of organisational change occasioned by the digital revolution or understanding the myriad of interconnected variables needing to be addressed as each school shapes its increasingly mature and powerful ecosystem (Helbing, 2014).
For schools to thrive and grow in a digital and networked world they have to be highly agile, responsive largely self governing organisations with a culture that embraces on-going, often uncertain change and evolution.
Governments globally have recognised that need and given most schools and principals the degree of autonomy needed to take charge of the school’s future. Yes sometimes the rhetoric is not always matched by the reality but notwithstanding it is critical each school principal works to create a culture where the school and its community – and most assuredly not the central office – shapes the way forward.
The onus is on the principal. He/she must lead.
The question you need ask has your school taken charge of its growth and is shaping its desired future? If not why not?
- Helbing, D (2014) ‘What the digital revolution means to us’. Science Business 12 June 2014 – http://bulletin.sciencebusiness.net/news/76591/What-the-digital-revolution-means-for-us
- Lipnack, J & Stamps, J 1994, The age of the network: Organizing principles for the 21st century, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.