Practitioner Research for Organizational Learning

Dr Junjun Chen

This course explores how leadership for improving outcomes requires making learning visible. It presents the concept of ecosystem and its constituent levels and components as a base for understanding and applying the potential of research-engaged teams.

Participants explore the concept of process-based, outcomes-based and evidence-based practice as mechanisms for organizational effectiveness and improvement. The course suggests that leadership for enhanced outcomes requires evidence-based practice. Case studies of evidence-based practice are examined as exemplars of ways that practitioner-led research can support organizational learning.

Participants consider how different models of evidence-based and inquiry processes may support organizational learning. This includes consideration of qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding and interpreting data as well as the notion of practitioner- research as study. This course provides the knowledge base for conducting an Innovation Development Project.

(a) Preparation task: Ecosystem analysis (25%): Each participant writes a critical ecosystem/SWOT analysis of his/her own professional setting and identifies with justifications a pressing problem that needs to be addressed and suggests a methodological approach to tackle the problem. (900-1,000 Words)

(b) Participant-led presentation (20%): Each participant selects a practitioner-based problem and facilitates critical discussions of the problem with selected framework(s) to make a case for her/his proposed change. Applications of research knowledge and contextual analyses are critical criteria for evaluating the presentation.

(c) Case development and analysis (55%):
The proposal has to integrate and address feedback from presentation and online discussions, discuss how successful outcomes will be determined, and how evidence will be collected to determine outcomes, and strategies to develop an evidence-based practice to be conducted by a research-engaged practitioner team in his/her own setting, and how critical evaluation will benefit