This publication represents the first of a series of books that will profile some of the forward thinking work being undertaken by leading education researchers and policy experts focused on transforming the face of public education and the future of Alberta. The Co-creating a Learning Alberta book series is a partnership with leading public policy thinkers and the Alberta Teachers' Association that flows from the public lecture series called "Learning our Way to the Next Alberta." Since its inception in 2004, this lecture series has drawn over 5,000 participants and continues to push our thinking about the hopes and possibilities for the future of this province and is profiled at www.learningourway.ca. In these public lectures, three questions have come to dominate the conversations about the future of the Alberta: What is the Alberta that the world needs to see? What kind of Albertans do we need to become to get us there? and How will leadership in learning help us become our best selves?
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a set of concepts, tools and applications which has been so successful in manufacturing industry that we are now witnessing experimentation in the transference of Total Quality Management to the public sector provision of government, health and education in North America, Europe and elsewhere. TQM is starting to set a new paradigm for management approaches in the public sector and "not for profit" enterprises. All key public service managers should at least need to know the basics of TQM, its possibilities and limitations for the public sector, and particularly the types of applications which could work for them. For all public sector managers this book provides: a clear understanding of the key concepts of TQM; a critical understanding of their relevance to the public sector; empirical evidence of TQM applications in government, health and education; and exploration of the public sector TQM possibilitites yet to be realized. It draws throughout on case examples from Britain, Canada, the USA and continental Europe which illustrate the application of TQM to the public sector.
This book offers a basic introduction to the skills of counselling and helping. It gives a clear picture of the potential of counselling and also highlights possible limitations. Assessing the situation in regards to your own skills and capabilities is discussed as well as the ethical and moral considerations which need to be made.
Our Ongoing Search to Understand and Enable the Practice of Innovation to Drive Improved Organizational Performance The Innovation Expedition was launched on April 1, 1991 at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The Banff Centre is a world class centre for the arts, leadership, innovation and mathematics. It is also a gathering place for cross boundary imagineers. Since that time, the Expedition (now a private company) has been engaged in a global search for innovative ideas, individuals, organizations, projects and products concerned with nurturing the change leaders required to both build high performing organizations in the new knowledge-
The Innovation Expedition describes Renaissance Leaders as high integrity individuals with sensitive self-awareness and a passion both for driving high performance in their organizations and for helping to make their communities and the world a better place. These leaders have a sense of history and an unusual capacity for viewing the world holistically, for practicing systems thinking, for injecting a global and a future's perspective into present challenges, for honouring diversity, and for drawing on ideas and best practices from diverse disciplines and economic sectors. They also demonstrate an ability to take the input from these various disciplines, synthesize it and integrate it for application to a specific complex task. Finally, they have mastered the art of demonstrating grace under pressure, and of inspiring others to have the courage to collaborate and innovate in order to dramatically improve organizational performance.
The point is simple: prediction is very difficult (if not impossible) to get right. The best we can hope for from our futurists is to draw attention to unfolding patterns and their possible implications. That's it. And that is what this book does. It was developed from a presentation given to a meeting of Fellows of the Royal Society for Arts and Manufacturing (RSA) held in Vancouver in 2011, and explores several unfolding patterns and their possible implications. I seek here to offer an interpretation of the significance of these developments in terms of unfolding and overlapping 'S' curves, and suggest that there is an opportunity for a new enlightenment or Renaissance, despite the disruption many of the patterns I describe have on our understanding of the world around us. This Renaissance can already be seen in some regions of the world, and there are signs everywhere of the change it will involve. Towards the end of the book, these examples are explored to illustrate what the new Renaissance may be like.
People are actively engaged in a life-search for meaning and this search can lead them to take a spiritual perspective of themselves and the world in which they live. Some find this a spiritual journey-a journey towards an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the deepest values and meanings by which people live-through art, music or religion. The ultimate purpose of our spiritual journey is to be an enabling meaning to be found and given for self and others. In Tibetan Buddhism, the ultimate intention and purpose of our personal and spiritual journey is to be of service and benefit to all beings and to bring all beings to 'enlightenment'. Enlightenment is the ultimate step on our journey, whereby we go beyond our everyday consciousness to serve a 'greater whole', where we are in touch with our ultimate, true nature- the essence of our being. We can think of this journey to enlightenment as a journey both for personal mastery and beyond it.
We began, prompted by the late Chris Gonnet, Superintendent of Grande Prairie Public Schools, to explore the question 'What Makes a Great School?'in December 2010 at a meeting in Boston. We concluded that it involved many inter-connected elements, but that the key components were focused teacher leadership enabled by being empowered and resourced to make a difference. Rethinking Leadership sees evidence-informed practice as the fulcrum point for leveraging school improvement, especially if it systematically supported within a systematic way at the jurisdiction and provincial levels to build school leadership capacity. We also concluded that the framing conditions for the work of the school - the provincial/ state policies, curriculum requirements, financial arrangements, assessment regimes as well as the policies of school boards and districts - either enables or impairs the ability of a team within the school to create a great school for all students.
There is a great deal of talk about a "transformation" taking place in post-secondary education, linked to changes in the nature of work, technology, and the challenge of financing education at a time of austerity. The New York based journalist, Thomas Friedman, for example, writing in the New York Times in January 2013, imagined a different future for colleges and universities:"I can see a day soon where you'll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world -- some computing from Stanford,some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh -- paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion."It is through these market based mechanisms - the thinking goes - that colleges and universities will be transformed. He's still dreaming the world is flat, he can dream on.
Understanding educational success of Alberta or Finland needs to include an awareness of socio-cultural, political, and economic factors-issues covered in several chapters of this book.Indeed, education policies that drive better equity and equality in these systems must be kept at the center of attention when considering any lessons from these high-performing school systems.Finland has shown, just like Alberta, that educational change should be systematic and coherent, in contrast with the current haphazard intervention efforts of many other countries...my own conclusion is that developing the capacities of schools through interventions like AISI (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement) in Alberta and school-led curriculum system in Finland is much more important than testing the hell out of students, and that some out-of-school policies and support mechanisms to families and children associated with health, well-being and happiness are also necess
We are not, as a species, very good at prediction. This you will quickly realize as you read the first chapter of this book. Yet we need prediction to live our daily lives-insurance, weather forecasting, shipping, flight and other decisions depend on them.We make predictions all the time and sometimes we get it right.Strategic foresight is not about prediction. It is about understanding and anticipating different futures. The future is rarely a straight line from the past-it is subject to change and uncertainty. What strategic foresight as a process does is seek to understand why the future will be different from the past and what the implication of these differences are. In this book, I provide insights from forty years of consulting practice with organizations from large (Oracle, TESCO, Heinz, Barclays, Conoco-Phillips), medium (Debenhams, West Yorkshire Police, Millennium Copthorne) and small (Elk Island Public Schools, Alberta Assessment Consortium, Contact North/Contact Nord); for-profit and non-profit.
Over 140 references to English-language journal articles about personality as it relates to academic achievement, conditioning, anxiety, and learning performance. General topical arrangement. Brief annotations. Author index.
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