Schools may be the starkest example in modern society of an entire institution modeled after the assembly line. This has dramatically increased educational capability in our time, but it has also created many of the most intractable problems with which students, teachers, and parents struggle to this day. If we want to change schools, it is unlikely to happen until we understand more deeply the core assumptions on which the industrial-age school is based.
— Peter Senge

 

fieldbook.com is home to The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook Project, currently featuring

Schools That Learn
A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators,
Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About
Education
by Peter Senge, Nelda Cambron-McCabe, Timothy Lucas,
Bryan Smith, Janis Dutton, and Art Kleiner
(2000, New York: Doubleday/Currency)

Read the press release

fieldbook.com is also home to:

The Dance of Change:
The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations,
by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, George Roth, and Bryan Smith
(1999, New York: Doubleday/Currency).

Note to the media, contributors, and others looking for promotional information on The Dance of Change: please look at our press release

This web site is intended to serve the far-flung community of learning organization practitioners. These are people drawn together by the idea of a "learning organization": an organization focused on marrying the development of every member with superior performance in service of that organization's purpose.The more the organization's members increase their ability to learn collaboratively, the more they can accomplish, the higher their performance, and the more effectively they can hope to change their organization, and the world, for the better.

Learning organizations can include corporations, small businesses, schools, hospitals, government agencies, non-profits — or indeed, any enterprise where people gather to accomplish something that they could not create alone.

In our work, the practice of organizational learning has been expressed through five lifelong organizational learning disciplines: Systems Thinking, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, and Team Learning. (Follow this link for more information.) This was the theme of The Fifth Discipline,by Peter Senge (Doubleday, 1990), expanded in the 1994 Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Doubleday) and 1999's The Dance of Change. A new fieldbook on education Schools That Learn, has just been released (September, 2000). This web site, first opened in 1996, is continually developed and maintained by the people who created the series of "Fifth Discipline" fieldbooks.