Many organisations, including VET providers, are looking to find ways to achieve competitive advantage through the people they employ. Creating this advantage has a number of facets and most of these depend on training and developing people, and their ability to learn. The VET sector also faces significant changes in the ways it does business.…

This Support Document was produced by the authors based on their research for the report, "Investigating Learning through Work: The Development of the 'Provider Learning Environment Scale'" (ED503392). While couched in very different terms, the analysis presented in this report points to a substantial overlap in the conceptual bases that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging literatures on organizational learning and strategic management by developing a practice perspective on strategic organizational learning (SOL). While the literature on SOL has been growing, much of it has targeted exclusively practitioners and has not yet elaborated the mechanics and…

The purpose of this research activity was to investigate contemporary understandings of the connections between learning and work. This initial work was then used to inform the development of an organisational tool that registered training organisations (RTOs) could use to identify organisational practices likely to lead to greater learning at…

The leadership task for a new age of schools is to stimulate continuous innovation, rather than to manage for compliance using outdated standards of work. This paper presents a typology of work cultures--the varying work conditions of schools and the challenges they present to principals in developing high-performance work cultures. Data were…

This paper presents the initial findings of a comprehensive 28-school multi-site case study, which sought to identify patterns in schools that are changing bureaucratic work patterns to those found in quality-management systems. The schools are located in Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, and Louisiana; all are led by principals who are trainers in…

The self-interests of the primary participants in the school and the common welfare as represented in the improvement of the American educational system are most likely to become one in the process of improving the school as a work place. This strategy was explored in the form of a collaborative enterprise. Eighteen schools in southern California…

Chaos theory provides a useful mental model for guiding change as leaders garner the energy from unpredictable events for realizing transformation goals. The paper considers chaos theory as a framework for managing school change toward Total Quality Management work cultures. Change is possible to manage when plans are made and then followed by a…

This book proposes the possibility of "extraordinary change" in individuals and organizations and suggests a source of "boundless energy" for bringing those changes into being. That source is freed by removing internal barriers to change within oneself. It provides personal experiences of transformational learning to introduce…

The world of work is composed of contradictory conditions which schooling tries to mediate through a reproductive process. The present organization of production based on wage-labor is inherently self-contradictory in that the interests of management and labor are directly opposed. School prepares individuals to deal with the types of peer…

The attitudes and experiences of 18 vocational education and training (VET) practitioners considered to be at the leading edge of online education in technical and further education (TAFE) in South Australia were examined to determine how leading-edge VET practitioners engaged in designing, developing, and facilitating online learning understand…