CAREER DEVELOPMENT IN A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

have no time for indulging into such a time consuming process of schools becoming
learning organizations.
To support this argument Lashway (1998) has painted a school picture in the
present scenario. This view is supported by rationale that corporate sector has all the
means and resources to develop themselves into learning organizations, whereas, the
schools lack such type of resources and even if they have still they do not have the time
to do so. Sometime back other corporate sector organizations were as rigid in their
policies and structure as Lashway has taken note of the school setup.
In addition to this it is also note worthy that in the business organizations time is
more often evaluated in financial terms and are always under time constraint, so if they
could afford the time for transforming into learning organizations then how can
educational institutes not commit the time to become a learning organization as their very
essence of existence is based on all time commitment to individual development.
In the light of this definition, the proposed role of educational institutions from
social point of view is not much different to that as presented by Senge (1990) for a
learning organization. Lashway(1998) has pointed out that despite of the arguments for
incapability of educational institutes of become learning organizations, certain
researchers have identified some schools where new forms of instructions are being
practiced proficiently by the teachers and have resulted in impact on student learning and
behavior. The paper has quoted a study of three schools by Beverly Showers, Carlene
Murphy and Bruce Joyce (1996, in Creating a Learning Organization; Lashway, 1998).
The models of cooperative learning, concept attainment and synectics were implemented
in these schools. The results showed that at the end of first year 88% of the teachers were
practicing those models, promotion rate increased and disciplinary events dropped to one
fifth of the previous level. In another study Bruce Joyce and Emily Calhoun reported that
a middle school where school data was used for strategic decisions was able to achieved
95% of student promotion rate compared to the previous 30% promotion rate in the same
school.
Lots of different types of data is recorded in schools, the same data could be
grouped and analyzed meaningfully for learning and adapting to achieve desired results.
Information drawn from such a record could be a learning lesson for the educational