Redefining Learning Organisations for Effective School Leadership and Management

Abstract

This paper seeks to first delve deeper into the meaning of a learning organizations. I select some meanings from literature by dedicated scholars, but focus more on Peter Senge’s five disciplines which gained popularity in terms of his viewpoint that although there is no consensus on the meaning of learning organizations, there is a converging view that continuous learning and active involvement of all stakeholders play a pivotal role in learning organization. From the outset, I acknowledge that there are many meanings that are contributed by dedicated scholars on the subject but choose meanings that I consider to provide a clearer meaning based on the context. Then I offer an analysis of the school (henceforth referred to apropos: school X throughout the discussion in this paper) as a learning organizational context by identifying language barrier as a gap that hinders the dissemination of information in that school. I label this as a gap cautiously because the issues relating to language barrier and dissemination of information in school X are not problems as in the sense of them being wrong and needing to be fixed, but I consider them to be gaps that require enterprising and innovative ideas by everyone in school X to close down, hence the expediency of a redefinition.