Experimental Research on Schools as Learning Organisations: The Case of Romania

The ‘learning organization’ is one of the organizational models developed by the academic and business environment to provide solutions to the need for companies to adapt and survive, which knew over time numerous extensions, from being defined in relation to business organizations, to be linked to non-profit organizations – hospitals, public administration and even schools and universities. Following the ‘school as leaning organization’ (SLO) concept and model proposed by Kools and Stoll (2017), the present paper explores the question of to what extent the keycharacteristics of learning organizations already exist in schools in Romania. It is based on previous results of a theoretical approach which showed that a slight starting baseline could be given by the performance indicators and descriptors identified as being correlated with dimensions and key-characteristics of the oecdunicef’s SLO model. The present approach in an experimental one, at a sample of 238 urban and rural schools externally evaluated in the first semester of the school year 2018–2019 and the results highlight that the minimum levels of incidence of several key-characteristics of SLO’s varying between 30.67% and 73.10%. The limitation of this paper is given by the fact that the data were collected from the external and internal evaluation of schools, in order to determine the level of educational services offered, means not specifically devoted to identifying SLO characteristics.