Schools are understood, more and more, as collective projects and open organizations, with its own values. They are also considered vital, leaded, with social processes, with competent professionals and focused on collective knowledge and creation management processes.
To encourage collaborative working, overtaking individualism and professional isolation, institutional perspective needs to understand and analyze organizational and informal learning processes, and those mechanisms that encourage them. Researches on educational change reaffirm the importance of focusing on school as an organization that favor or limit curricular activities in the classroom and of promoting processes that help to encourage institutionalization or instauration of the best educational practices. To achieve it allow us to link processes of personal development, professional development, organizational development, and social development.
“To analyze organizational and informal learning processes” and to “value the viability of using technologies linked to social media and apps for encouraging collaborative working and institutional of teachers” are the main goals of this project.
Its development includes: (a) the diagnosis of reality in school through a questionnaire about organizational learning for its application in more than 700 non-university centers; (b) the analysis of reality in 20 schools about the related topics; (c) the development of a map based on technologies linked to organizational learning and to the use (or not) given by teachers in their workplace; (d) the development and validation of apps (in 10 schools) that allow teacher collaboration; and (e) the definition of a program that encourages knowledge and use of apps focused on professional/organizational development in schools.
These three approaches to reality of schools include different periods, different territories, different strategies/instruments (document analysis, questionnaire, interviews, groups discussion, the Delphi technique, work in pairs and working groups) and different sources of information (teachers, principals and experts). Results obtained, check with theoretical experts, must allow us to create a model, a methodology and some apps in order to promote and drive collaborative and institutional working in non-university centers.
The main products are: a report on organizational and informal learning in Spanish schools, a reference map about how to use technologies in collaborative working, the development of three apps for mobile phones and the development of a technical, and educational manual for teachers. The dissemination includes paper in high impact factor journals, information on the Net, and a conference. That way we can guarantee the application of results in other schools that have not been included in the sample of this study.