Learning Schools: Schools as learning organisations

Learning Schools is addressing a common problem within the educational systems of most European countries – the loss of knowledge and expertise with teacher retirement, attrition and migration. Most schools do not have any mechanisms for knowledge capturing, synthesising and sharing within the organisation or others use only separate tools, which are not organised as an efficient system. The aim of our transnational team of experts is to enhance individual, team and organisational learning in schools. The direct target group of the project is school principals, school leaders and teachers from Bulgaria, Spain, Italy and Turkey. In order to achieve the project’s goals we are creating the first knowledge management system and platform for schools in the participants’ countries, which will contain a set of synchronised tools.

Objectives

The project will be developed in the framework of the learning organisation and schools as learning organisations, which has integrated most of the achievements of the management thought for the last 25 years. The diverse cultural, economic and educational context of all the countries will allow for rich country specific analyses of the characteristics of the learning schools in each country, the best practices they apply and the existing level of knowledge management. All the findings will lead to the development of an integrated model of learning schools (MLS), an elaborate assessment instrument for comparison of the achievements of all the users of the platform and the existing best practices. The country specific analyses will feed examples for the knowledge management system, which we are devising as well. All these tools will be synchronised on a platform, which will make them user-friendly and accessible for school principals and school leadership at large. The platform will lead to the development of learning community of schools network. All the registered users will be able to share best practices and expertise.

Project Outcomes & Results

The expected impact of the project is beyond the borders of the applicants’ countries. The integrated interactive resources will be available in English, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish and Turkish languages. It is an innovative contribution on national, regional and EU level. All the findings and outcomes of the project will benefit researchers and policy makers with instruments for enhancement of the educational systems reforms. All the instruments integrated in the platform and the platform itself will be tested in several schools in each of the participants’ countries. The schools are selected to have good digital equipment, but incomplete knowledge management set of instruments. The piloting stage will provide significant and contextual feedback from the direct target group in each country.

The platform and the instruments integrated it will be fine-tuned and improved afterwards in order to become intuitive and user friendly. The participants in the piloting stage are school leaders and teachers.
A series of dissemination events are planned in each country in order to popularise the outcomes among the target group and the relative stakeholders. Two types of events will be conducted – national one in Bulgaria and regional in all other countries. In long term perspective, the project goal is to support the ongoing educational reforms in EU countries as it raises awareness about the need to capture, synthesise, share and asses knowledge on organisational level and will prove the benefits of that.