Session 1 ELEVEN

How best would you describe how your organizational learnt?

Hi everyone~

I'm SHI Yi,Eleven. I'm from Hangzhou, China and now a full-time student of MSc LIM. I owned a bachelor's degree in Arts with specialty of Radio & Television Journalism in Zhejiang University City College before I came to HKU. My college is a traditional education organization which has made positive change roughly towards the five principles developed by Senge et al., however, the performance of change is unobvious.

1. Personal Mastery

Most classes in Chinese college are always like‘duck-stuffing’. Teachers do nothing but keep speaking until finish inducing the new knowledge they must spread out. Students just take notes and remember the key points but
no thinking or understanding. This kind of class can still be seen in my college because, even though majority of teachers try to seek way out to change this situation, the result is not ideal. The course content itself is boring/unmeaning due to teachers/colleges pay less attention on developing students’ personal vision and aspiration. Thus, most students and teachers cannot engage in a deepening vision.

2. Mental Models

Strict teaching rules, successful teaching experience, inherited teaching concepts, they together formulate my college’s mental model, which can be seen as academic authority and, it is always unbreakable. Thus, college would ignore each individual’s mental model, which leads to a limitation for people to make change as they got less chance to touch assumptions, which are crucial for carrying out the succeeding principles.

3. Shared Vision

My college always holds some meetings in order to give both students and college staff chances to communicate and exchange opinions about teaching methods, course models, course contents, teachers’ teaching enthusiasm or attitude, old rules, etc. The purpose is to found a sense of commitment to a future development to be created collectively. However, some students in meetings would not point out anything negative, as they fear to against leadership of college. Thus, these meetings to some degree are workable but the effect is not outstanding.

4. Team Learning

Fortunately, I got lots of opportunities to participate in group learning due to the distinctiveness of my major, Radio &Television Journalism, as it is impossible to finish a news-producing job all by one’s own. We need team work and meanwhile, at least one teacher’s direction. Team members got chance to communicate and think together, which is sustained collective, and finally achieve a consensus.

Not only students, also staff and managements that response for similar works try team learning, they exchange ideas always so that learn from each other. With adequate team working, the college maintains a substantial development.

5. Systems thinking

To sum up, it is obvious that my college is lack of systems thinking, expects for innovate and they tried but meanwhile, still hold some fossil regulations. When encounter problems, they just solve them positively but no consideration of influence, that cause by these problems, to the larger structures.