School And The Workplace

In response to concerns that the educational system - from public schools through colleges, universities, and apprenticeship programs - cannot adequately prepare students for work in the new economy, Integrating School and Workplace Learning in Canada proposes alternation - a hybrid form of learning that, by combining experiential and cognitive learning skills, allows individuals to develop the relevant skills and intellectual capabilities to address and solve complex problems encountered in the workplace. Alternation involves not only a curricular balance between the theoretical and the practical but also two distinct venues for learning - the classroom and the workplace. The authors discuss cognitive and social learning, its implementation in a variety of settings, its role in smoothing the school/work transition process, and its potential to contribute to the knowledge and skills needed by the workforce. They bring a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to bear in their analyses of the principles and practices of alternation, providing historical, theoretical, and practical insights. Their analysis contributes to and extends the current debate and discussion surrounding necessary changes in our education and training practices.

What the Book Is About This book is about the problem of organizational learning, that is the analysis of organizations conceived as learning systems. In order to survive in a period of a rapid change, organizations must innovate and than to develop and exploit their abilities to learn. The most innovative organizations are those that can respond with great efficiency to internal and external changes. They respond to and generate technological change by acting as effective learning systems. They maximize the learning potential of ongoing and "normal" work activities. The organizational structure and the technology allow members to learn while the organizations itself learns from its members. So organizations reach high levels of innovation when structured to take advantage of the social, distributed, participative, situated processes of learning developed by its members in interaction with the technological environment. Organizations should consider learning as an explicit "productive" objective. They must create integrated learning mechanisms, that encompass technological tools, reward and incentive systems, human resource practices, belief systems, access to information, communication and mobility patterns, performance appraisal systems, organizational practices and structures. The design of efficient learning organizations requires cognitive, technological and social analyses. All the computer-based technologies (e. g. office automation, communication and group decision support) not only those devoted to and used in training activities, have to be considered as tools for organizational learning and innovation.

An in-depth exploration of what really lies behind our problematic behavioural patterns in the workplace, and a blueprint for the emotional skills we need to overcome them. Modern businesses place huge emphasis on technical training. And yet a lot of what determines the success or failure of organisations has nothing to do with the sort of hard skills taught at business school; instead, it comes down to the degree of emotional intelligence circulating in the workplace. This is a book that introduces us to twenty core emotional skills that can help businesses to flourish. They range from giving honest feedback, to accepting that it's OK to fail, to addressing jealousies and insecurities within teams. We learn about how our childhoods continue to have an often unhelpful impact on how we deal with colleagues, and the best ways we might speak so that others will listen. The book is informed by the practical work that the Learning and Development division of The School of Life carries out, endeavouring to change the culture within organisations around the world through teaching teams the art of emotional intelligence. It shows us not only how to be a more effective worker, but a more well-balanced human too.

This interdisciplinary volume brings together leading scholars from several disciplines to uncover the key to young people’s socialization within institutional settings, from school to the workplace. Among the questions they consider are: what aspects of interactional competence are relevant for participation in practical activities within those settings? What are the interactional procedures through which diverse facets of interactional competence are recognized, legitimized and assessed in the course of practical activities? How do these procedures shape and reflect social institutions and people's understanding of them? The collection discusses interactional competences across a variety of institutional settings, and reflects on the institutional order by scrutinizing how such competences are interactionally treated within everyday institutional practices. The volume enriches an interdisciplinary understanding of fundamental concepts in the social sciences and will therefore be of interest to those working within linguistics, sociology, education, psychology of work, and speech therapy.

Which non-American education systems best prepare young people for fulfilling jobs and successful adult lives? And what can the United States—where far too many young people currently enter adulthood without adequate preparation for the twenty-first-century job market—learn, adopt, and adapt from these other systems? In Schooling in the Workplace, Nancy Hoffman addresses these questions head on, arguing that “the smartest and quickest route to a wide variety of occupations for the majority of young people in the successful countries—not a default for failing students—is a vocational program that integrates work and learning.” As she notes, the programs that successfully integrate work and learning all share a fundamental commitment to helping young people find successful careers: “The purpose is not ‘college for all,’ as in the United States today, but rather to provide the education and training young people need to prepare for a career or calling.” Schooling in the Workplace explores the vocational education programs in a wide range of countries, focusing in rich and useful detail on six in particular: Australia, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. Framing these discussions, however, is a persistent focus on American circumstances and challenges. Far more than a survey of six “foreign” programs, this is a book prompted by and organized around the policy and practical challenges facing the United States.

This timely volume raises issues concerning the nature of school mathematics and mathematics at work, and the challenges of teaching valuable mathematics in school and providing appropriate training for a variety of careers. It offers lively commentaries on important `hot' topics: transferring knowledge and skill across contexts; ‘authentic mathematics’; comparability of different types of assessment; and analyses of research methods.