The benefits of a collaborative school culture include reduced teacher isolation, social and emotional support, opportunities for professional development and learning, and closer ties with significant stakeholders, such as families and community organizations. While collaborative cultures may be powerful, they also may be either misguided or superficial. Further, cultural change is difficult and norms such as teacher isolation and autonomy are well entrenched. These concerns point to the need for a change process that has a positive focus, is essentially self-organizing, encourages deep reflection, and avoids the pitfalls of manipulation by school administrators. This analysis points to consideration of appreciative inquiry, a strengths-based process that builds on 'the best of what is' in an organization. This paper presents research on the impact an appreciative inquiry process had on building a collaborative culture in 22 schools located in British Columbia, Canada.
Knowledge management has the potential to develop strategic advantage and enhance the performance of an organization in terms of productivity and business process efficiency. For this reason, organizations are contributing significant resources to knowledge management; investing in information location and implementing knowledge management processes and systems. However, most of these processes and systems focus only on knowledge management and omit the critical element of value. This paper examines intellectual capital and knowledge management within the not-for-profit environment of higher education. The research is focused on intellectual capital and is framed by the perspective of the strategic importance of knowledge. It is argued that the understanding and application of knowledge management within institutions of higher education is underdeveloped which resulted in a model and framework being proposed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.