Redesigning Staff Development as Organizational Case Learning: Tapping into School Stakeholders’ Collaborative Potential for Critical Reflection and Transformative Leadership Action

Joseph Claudet

doi:10.4236/ojl.2012.14005

Abstract

This article reports on activities associated with one school-university partnership project focused on providing multimedia-integrated organizational learning and development opportunities to stakeholders in K-12 school communities struggling with real-world school change and improvement challenges. A central feature of the project’s organizational case learning design is the use of multimedia case production technology in conjunction with context-specific school situational data to immerse school stakeholders in the theatrical portrayal and analysis of their own school dilemma challenges as a means to jumpstart collaborative teaming and data-driven problem solving. Multimedia case development and analysis efforts involving stakeholders in one middle school community who are confronting a difficult, politically charged set of school improvement challenges are highlighted. Project findings associated with the use of multimedia technology and data-driven organizational case learning as tools to inform an alternative staff development approach for promoting positive school leadership teaming and real-world problem solving among education stakeholders in K-12 school communities are discussed.

Highlights

In my staff development and school improvement consulting work over the past two decades with K-12 schools and school districts, I have worked and continue to work to help educators and diverse groups of education stakeholders better understand who they are and where they are going as teaching, leading, and learning organizations through learning how to find creative ways to leverage their own situational contexts and challenges to work together more effectively as collaborative leading and learning communities
Collective experiences of middle school stakeholders and university-based multimedia production specialists working together over a two-year period in this collaborative project served to generate a number of intriguing insights concerning the challenges and possibilities of organizational learning and development in this middle school learning community. These insights related to the potential usefulness of multimedia case development as an alternative staff development endeavor that can help foster among diverse school stakeholders a strong team mind-set and a collegial desire to realize positive school community instructional change and organizational learning
A unique feature of this school-university collaborative project involves leveraging the power of multimedia technology to engage school stakeholders directly in addressing their own context-specific school leadership dilemma challenges through sustained immersion in a constructivist multimedia case production and analysis team learning experience

Summary

Introduction

In my staff development and school improvement consulting work over the past two decades with K-12 schools and school districts, I have worked and continue to work to help educators and diverse groups of education stakeholders better understand who they are and where they are going as teaching, leading, and learning organizations through learning how to find creative ways to leverage their own situational contexts and challenges to work together more effectively as collaborative leading and learning communities. As the movie’s plot line thickens and the perspectivist conflicts begin to boil over, one of the movie’s primary characters, “Dr Grace Augustine” (played by Sigourney Weaver), admonishes the corporate administrators in charge of the Pandora mining operation that “if you want to share this world with them [the Na’vi], you need to understand them [emphasis added]”. With this statement, Grace Augustine makes a defiant claim for the importance of working collaboratively to strive to comprehend differences and to understand the multiple (sometimes conflicting) perspectives, values, and beliefs of the diverse stakeholders in your organizational arena. For Augustine, an interplanetary cultural anthropologist, understanding multiple stakeholder differences and acting on those understandings are fundamentally important tasks essential to building a solid foundation for positive collaborative

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