Educational systems are much broader than simply consisting of teachers, administrators, and students. Instead, education is a system of interrelationships of students, teachers, administrators, communities, and cultures that vary in content and context (Frick, 1991). Educational communities and cultures have been greatly impacted in the 21st century by technology, globalization, and a global economy (Wishnietsky, 1993). As with the dissipating national boundaries, schools are rapidly becoming global interconnected communities of learning. As emerging technologies impact the way that people live and learn, schools are being forced to change as their communities and cultures change. To bring about change, educational leaders need to follow the best current knowledge about organizational change (Beckner & Barker, 1994) and establish climates of trust and openness in both the schools and the communities they serve.
Technologies enable the merging of school functions and processes in a manner that makes discussions of organizational hierarchies, organizational boundaries, and individual job functions nearly meaningless. Without technology in the information age, schools will be at a level of low- performance because of a lack of connectivity to the rest of society. Emerging technologies have thrown schools into a high velocity state of being, and the old hierarchical structures of schools are becoming ineffectual at a rapid rate. The old ways of thinking that organizations and schools were "machines" that could be "designed, measured, and controlled" are outdated in the information age. As described by Handy (1996), organizations are beginning to be more like "networks," and in order to function, "networks" must have connectivity.
There will not be "one school of the future" according to Perelman (1987), but instead there will be various settings for schools with a common focus of utilizing technologies for delivering personalized instruction. United States companies as well as public schools are working to transform their organizations for meeting technological innovations of the 21st century. According to Dee (1995), sixty-eight percent of Fortune 1,000 companies reported in 1995 that they are using high-performance teams.
The school's learning capacity is augmented with the establishment of high-performance technology teams. Through high-performance technology teams an organizational commitment to learning becomes a priority (Ulrich, Von Glinow, and Jick, 1993). Organizations are placing greater reliance upon teams for meeting the learning challenges upon today's work force. The deep changes that are required of schools for meeting future organizational challenges can be accomplished with the institutionalization of high-performance technology teams in learning organizations.
This guide has been developed for educational leaders. Educational leaders in the context of this guide include administrators, team leaders, technology coordinators as well as others who serve their districts in a leadership capacity. The guide is designed so that it can be read from cover to cover, or it can be used as a browsing tool for finding topics of interest. Those with higher levels of experience in team building may want to simply browse through the topics, characteristics, and checklists on specific topics. For those who are new to teams and teamwork, this guide provides fundamental team building concepts and techniques.
Schools are faced with making fundamental changes as emerging technologies continue to change how people learn and teach. Building high-performance technology teams is one method for educational leaders to implement an integral component for transforming schools into true learning organizations. This guide is intended to help educational leaders organize high-performance technology teams as a crucial strategy for building high capacity learning organizations.
This educational leader's guide is intended to serve as a "guiding document" for the establishment, development, and maintenance of high-performance technology teams within learning organizations. The process of designing and developing teams will help establish an increased awareness among stakeholders of the potential of high-performance technology teams for increasing productivity and effectiveness within learning organizations. A systematic approach for addressing school issues of staff development, technology integration, and information processing within learning organizations is the purpose of this guide. Additionally, this guide serves as a framework for building synergistic processes within boards of education, community groups, and other instances of committee and group activities.
The structure of this guide is a system of interrelated processes centered around the topics of teams, technology, and learning. This guide is built around four sections that are not necessarily independent of each other, but provide a useful framework for planning and building high-performance technology teams in learning organizations. The four sections of this guide are 1)Transform with Teams, 2) Extend with Technology, 3) Align with Teams and Technology, and 4) Maximize with Learning.
Figure 1. The organization of the guide as a system of repeatable processes.
Within each section and for each topic are 'help sheets' on specific concepts and topics that are identified as follows:
- Characteristics
- Checklists
$ Cautions, and
Connections
Characteristics are designed to offer educational leaders a quick view of critical issues pertaining to specific topics in their schools. The lists of characteristics are intended to be general ideas and descriptors of various categories. These lists of characteristics describe the nature and aspects pertaining to various concepts and are designed to aid the educational leader in planning and initiating. Characteristics provide the educational leader with specific information to look for when implementing concepts.
Checklists are lists of things for educational leaders to do for successful implementation of various processes and programs. These checklists are not totally inclusive, and it is not necessary to incorporate all of them in all schools in order to be successful. Checklists are included to provide helpful information for getting started and staying organized when introducing, implementing, and institutionalizing teaming and technology into their school systems.
$ Cautions are included as helpful hints for recognizing and avoiding problems. In combining technologies and people, unexpected problems will arise because of approaches to change, introducing new technologies, and the required learning for successful implementation. When problems arise, it is common to ignore them and try to move forward to the business at hand. The problem is that the trouble is usually the business at hand.
Connections are cross-referenced links for leading the reader to other related concepts and processes. The educational leader's learning potential is enhanced by establishing and connecting related concepts instead of having to make and re-make the connections themselves. The digital version of this guide includes the feature of hyperlinks that provide the reader related material simply by clicking the mouse on the connection. Connections are both embedded within the text and included at the end of some sections. Below is an example of a hyperlink connection:
Connection:
Examples of planning worksheets are provided for every topic as well as a blank worksheet for educational leaders to use. The example planning worksheets are not designed to be recipe cards, but are intended to provide minimal direction for implementing the concepts contained throughout the educational leader's guide. The structure of the worksheets maintains an emphasis on the concepts of capturing, storing, retrieving, and sharing process information.
There are many different reading styles and methods for using guides and handbooks. For maximum benefit, the educational leader should read summarily through this entire guide for identifying individual school needs and methods for implementing high-performance technology teams in their specific school district. This guide, however, does not need to be read from cover to cover as one might read a book, and it is not necessary to implement the concepts contained within in a linear fashion. Some of the information will be useful and important to some districts more than other districts, and many districts will have already implemented some of the methods contained within this guide.
After identifying key concepts and strategies that can be used in specific school settings, use the characteristic lists and checklists for developing a plan-of-action for implementation. The caution lists are provided as suggestions for avoiding negative impacts that arise when implementing change in school systems. Most importantly, the educational leader using this guide needs to think systemically when implementing the concepts. Each section is interrelated to the other sections, and each of the broad categories directly effects the other categories within the system. The order of implementation isn't as important as knowing how transforming to a school that uses teams and technology effects the alignment of information processing and sharing that leads toward continuous learning.
A team is a group of people who work together towards common goals (Dee, 1995a; DuBrin, 1995; Hendrix, 1996 and Senge, 1990a). Team building is a group process of learning and working together toward reaching common goals. High-performance teams are groups that have developed a "shared vision" and have acquired proficiency at learning and working together. When teams reach high-performance, their school system is strengthened with the team's energy and successes. High-performance team members are generally empowered and have a sense that anything is possible. Individual characteristics are important in high-performance teams because they each bring something unique and enabling to the team. High-performance teams consistently accomplish more than what is possible with the simple sum of accomplishments of its individual members.
High-performance teams often consist of a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to performance and a common purpose (Bailey, Ross & Bailey, 1997). Membership of high-performance teams may include administrators, teachers, board members, students, and community. High-performance teams regularly hold themselves mutually accountable and are intensely committed to one another’s personal growth and success (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993).
Commitment to the team's shared purpose is the driving force from which the team excels. Most teams do not reach high-performance, and although "ordinary" teams and committees may be motivated to achieve a high-performance impact, they generally lack clarity in their purpose and goals. Often groups are put together without a collective focus on performance and lack the essential ingredients of commitment and shared purpose for reaching continuous levels of high-performance.
High-performance teams accept challenges by defining their shared purpose. By establishing a collective commitment to meeting challenges, the high-performance team's purpose becomes a shared purpose that most often brings about results. High-performance teams generally develop their own purpose, set their own performance goals, and through team learning tools build their own approach for addressing challenges. Unique to high-performance teams is the natural inclination to hold themselves mutually accountable for results thus failure and success are due to the team instead of individuals.
A group of high-performance individuals does not produce a high-performance team. Individual members of a team are highly significant determinants of team process and performance. The determinants of team performance are dependent on the abilities and skills of each member relative to other members of the team. What is new to this theory of team membership is that when considering "learning teams," skills and abilities are developed in processes of learning together that reinforces complementary skills in relation to one another. Team members who invest in time together and utilize team learning tools are capable of becoming a high-performance team.
The power of teams is based on the concept that a group of people will produce higher performance than the sum of what can be accomplished by its members working independently (Blanchard, Carew, and Parisi-Carew, 1990; Mankin, Cohen and Bikson, 1996). This means that an individual in a team will need to interact and communicate with other team members. A team is a group of individuals who share common goals and who must interact to perform their work (Blanchard, Carew & Parisi-Carew, 1990; Katzenbach; 1995, Katzenbach and Smith, 1993; Senge, 1990a). While members may perform their individual pieces of work, the primary processes of teamwork involve building relationships, communicating, coordinating, and exchanging information and knowledge. Groups of individuals who only aggregate their individual outputs are not functioning as a team. A team is a group who works together achieving things that are not possible individually.
Based on these definitions of high-performance teams, technology teams are then enhanced with interaction capabilities, with less limited time frames, and with more ability to capture and store knowledge from learning processes. Increasing team's capacities requires technologies, and incorporating technologies for teamwork requires defining the necessary conditions for ensuring that the technology will serve the team's needs. High-performance is possible among teams without technologies, but in absence of connectivity and expanded work conditions a diminished level of performance results.
In order for technologies to serve high-performance teams, the design of the technology needs to be mission-focused. User driven technologies are the most successful because the people who use the technology determine success or failure of new systems. When considering team technologies, users should be able to guide system operations so that the technology can be flexibly applied to their work. (Mankin, Cohen, and Bikson, 1996). Team technologies fill the gap between boundaries of time, physical space, and shared work spaces such as in whiteboards and tablets.
Communication networks that can connect teams and organizations have become a critical factor for determining the success or failure of schools. One of the primary requirements in designing technology teams is to create networks of both people and hardware that can communicate with other networks. No longer should systems require users to print out copies of information and send this information via out-dated channels such as inner-office mail. Within systems that are not integrated, users are required to execute extra time-consuming steps such as meeting face-to-face and printing hardcopies that decrease performance and increase the possibility of error.
Technology teams require connectivity, and the technology design must enable users of one network to communicate and work with users of other networks. In order to reach the highest levels of performance, teams need access to and the ability to work with information resources, people, and other units within and outside of the organization (Mankin, Cohen & Bikson, 1996). Additionally, teams seeking high-performance levels must be able to share their data and tools with each other without constraints on team communication processes. Emerging technologies eliminate the limitations of who team members work with and what team members work on. Technology does not, however, guarantee high-performance, but technology becomes the organization in which high-performing teams function (Lipnack and Stamps, 1994).
Last updated: March 10, 1998