Team Learning: Opportunities and challenges for school leaders

This article explores the potency of teamwork as a vehicle for organisational learning. The nature of teamwork presents possibilities for team learning to shape cultures that value and act on feedback to improve quality. However, a baseline survey of team incidence and practice in New Zealand schools highlights a tension between a high demand for accountability and a low emphasis on team review and development, the very conditions needed for team learning. Review of one large secondary school Senior Management Team revealed that whilst the team was generally performing well, there were gaps between expectations and actions in several skill areas critical to team learning. It is contended that defensiveness creates a tendency to bypass learning opportunities and that teams can learn the skills of productive dialogue to engage in effective communication and consequently in organisational learning. Leaders themselves should be challenged to learn and model productive dialogue in the context of team action. Unless leaders are motivated to make this kind of team development a priority, the potential of teams to contribute to organisational learning will not be realised.