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Learning from Cultural Diversity for Intercultural Competency and Global Stewardship Development in a Boarding School
Get PDFThis Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) explores opportunities to prioritize, teach, and assess intercultural competency in students at a large independent boarding school. The school currently assumes that the presence of a diverse population will result in intercultural learning, a strategy shown to be ineffective. Considering culture as the combined beliefs and behaviours of individuals due to the groups they have been a part of, and intercultural competency as the ability to interact appropriately with individuals who are different from oneself, the range of countries of origin and backgrounds of students, including boarders, provides diversity that could be leveraged to create opportunities for intercultural learning if appropriately facilitated. Intercultural competency has been identified as a key skill supporting the school’s strategic goal of developing global stewardship, defined by the school as a sense of social and environmental responsibility based upon a broad global perspective, global competencies, and the ability and desire to take action to promote a sustainable future. Combining servant leadership with culturally responsive school leadership, this OIP navigates existing structures of distributed leadership through an intentional reflection and change process. The outcome is the proposed institutional integration of culturally responsive school leadership principles and the development of a framework of articulated goals for global and intercultural competency. With specific targets set, teaching strategies intentionally integrating the perspectives of students from diverse backgrounds may support meaningful interactions, directed by experiential learning theory, leading to increased intercultural competency
Promoting Student Action in a Primary School
Get PDFThis organizational improvement plan addresses a problem of practice in the primary division of an international school. This improvement plan focuses on increasing the quantity and quality of student action as an outcome of learning as evidenced in the school’s curriculum mapping database. Proposed changes are based on the belief that the overarching purpose of schooling is to prepare individuals for full engagement and participation in democratic society. Full participation requires that students develop a sense of agency and empowerment to act upon the knowledge they gain through their schooling. Schooling provides students with the ability and disposition to challenge the status quo and think critically about issues of fairness, justice, and equity to create a more just society. This plan uses social justice as a lens through which to view the process of change, with a blend of transformative leadership and distributed leadership to guide the planning and implementation of this change plan. Kotter’s (1996) Stage Model of change provides a framework upon which this organizational improvement plan is structured and guided.
Keywords: Critical Theory, Transformative Leadership, Distributed Leadership, Kotter, Stage Model of Chang
Modernizing Nursing Education for Student Success
Get PDFNursing education has evolved over time to meet the changing demands of an increasingly complex healthcare system. To enable teaching faculty to facilitate students’ capacity in applying critical thinking and application of nursing concepts—skills required of graduate nurses--this Organization Improvement Plan (OIP) identifies classroom teaching strategies as instrumental in students’ acquiring these skills. Analysis of University and Program conditions identify challenges and strengths of both that are considered throughout this plan. Based in transformational leadership elements, this plan describes how a grassroots or informal leader can initiate change and move it forward with formal leaders’ support. Application of Kotter’s Eight-Step Change Process (1995) identifies necessary actions the informal change leader uses to raise awareness of the issue associated with conventional classroom teaching methods and follow through required to bring the plan to institutionalization. This Process also acknowledges the relationship between informal and formal leadership to advance improvements. The Harkness Model for Teaching (Trustees of Phillip Exeter Academy, 2019) is presented as a tangible way that active learning can be supported in the classroom setting. Although the long-term goal is to provide students with skills to enable them to be practice-ready on graduation, this plan focuses on providing teaching faculty with the motivation to modernize their classroom teaching strategies
Maladaptive Coping Habits Amongst Student Leaders in Peer Support Roles: Reframing Exposure to Vicarious Trauma
Get PDFUndergraduate orientation programs at post-secondary institutions are important platforms for new students to adjust to a new social and academic climate. Student leaders play a critical role in helping new students find belonging on campus. However, being in a peer support role can heighten student leaders’ exposure to vicarious trauma (VT) if they have not yet mastered how to regulate their own emotions or withstand the social and academic pressures associated with university. Many student leaders experience exacerbated symptoms of VT because of their maladaptive coping habits. Institution X does not have a viable framework to monitor or regulate student leaders’ interactions when supporting students in distress, nor does it have the means to measure coping skills or provide effective critical incident support. This Organizational Improvement Plan examines the use of maladaptive coping habits by student leaders when supporting peers in distress and discusses strategies to help these leaders develop heathy attitudes towards coping to overcome the negative effects of vicarious trauma. Situational Leadership® II (Blanchard et al., 2013; Zigarmi & Roberts, 2017) and Complexity Leadership Theory (Uhl-Bien & Marion, 2009; Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007) can be used to influence coping habits by creating a new paradigm for thinking about change management in which student leaders and administrators can explore issues collaboratively. A proposed solution is to create an extended training framework, which establishes learning communities as vehicles to teach adaptive coping skills using a modified dialectical behaviour therapy curriculum
CULTURAL AWARENESS: ORGANIZATIONAL IMPROVEMENT PLAN FOR IMPROVED STUDENT ACCOMMODATION
Get PDFCanadian colleges have the responsibility to be inclusive and diverse. The College is uniquely positioned to cater to a variety of students with varied learning needs. Concurrently, policy must accommodate students to encourage capacity to learn. The development of a campus environment that is culturally aware that supports a comprehensive student accommodation policy is the focus of this organizational improvement plan. Through the theoretical guidance of cultural organizational and evolutionary theory, a multi-year plan is developed. Capacity for the plan is through stakeholder representation and engagement. Further influence is garnered from an adaptive leadership approach that is communicated and organized through stakeholders and Network Improvement Communities. Cultural awareness will take time to develop yet a focused communication plan along with monitoring and evaluation plan will maintain accountability. The evolution of a new student accommodation policy will become reality as the depth of an inclusive student population is recognized
Teacher Leadership to Enhance Day Treatment Services
Get PDFDay treatment classrooms offer alternative educational programming for students who cannot attend regular classrooms due to their need for mental health care and treatment. The unique design of day treatment classrooms combines individualized educational programming provided by publicly funded teachers and mental health treatment provided by workers from a children’s mental health agency. The Problem of Practice (PoP) aims to increase the leadership capacity for an elementary teaching team providing day treatment services within a children’s mental health organization. The special education teacher and the academic programming of the student receives limited attention within the wider multidisciplinary team as the mental health treatment goals are prioritized, unintentionally overriding the educational goals. Too little is known about the current conditions under which this elementary teaching team in day treatment classrooms provide effective special education programming to its students. Emergent and authentic leadership approaches are examined within the existing distributed and team leadership style of the organization and critically analyzed through Nadler-Tushman’s Congruence Model. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) utilizes Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as its guiding organizational change framework to communicate the need for change and implement the change plan to enhance networking, collaboration, and communication with both school-based and non-school based stakeholders
Balancing the Dialectic in Non-Profit Leadership: Exploring the use of critical andragogy to achieve uniform service delivery in a harm reduction team, while maintaining their activist ethos.
Get PDFThe social service sector provides services to the communities they are a part of. In an environment where resources are scarce and the needs of the community are high, the sector is in a constant struggle to do more with less. This is especially true within youth and harm reduction services. The social service agencies also grapple internally, as neoliberal discourses permeate the management of community services. The social service agency within this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) houses a program that provides harm reduction services to youth over a large geographical urban and suburban landscape. The program is experiencing a lack of uniform service delivery, as the counsellors struggle to balance service provision with measures of resistance against the neoliberal forces impacting the social service sector. The author proposes that enhancing the critical learning culture within the program will create a shared vision within the team, to allow for a balance of uniform service delivery alongside supporting the activist ethos within the program. A plan within this OIP has been developed that is founded on a critical-team leadership model created by the author. The critical-team leadership model offers a social justice lens that is emancipatory and participatory for workers and community members alike. The leadership approach guides the proposed plan through a theory of change based on Freirean principles of critical andragogy. Throughout the OIP, the dialectical nature of the problem of practice is explored through rigorous analysis of the organization using tools such as the Organizational Development for Social Change (ODSC) framework, the critical-team leadership approach, and a Freirean change model, that focus on producing change through critical andragogy within the program
