A new school effectiveness: Multiple thinking and multiple creativity in action learning

Many policy-makers and educators are confused how thinking, creativity and intelligence are related to action learning and how they can contribute to school effectiveness particularly in a complicated context involving technological, economic, social, political and cultural aspects. This paper aims to address these issues and propose a framework for conceptualizing a new school effectiveness in terms of multiple thinking and multiple creativity in action learning at the student, teacher and organizational levels of a school. It is completely different from the traditional thinking and practice of school effectiveness.The paper first elaborates why and how contextualized multiple thinking (CMT) is needed to re-conceptualize the approach to enhancing school effectiveness in terms of multiple thinking and multiple creativity in action learning. It explains further how this CMT typology, together with the levels of thinking (from action to data, to information, to knowledge and to intelligence), provides a new framework of school effectiveness for (1) re-conceptualizing the relationship between CMT and action learning in various complicated contexts; (2) re-defining the nature of multiple creativity in thinking and action , and (3) broadening the possibilities and approaches to developing and enhancing multiple thinking and multiple creativity in action learning. This paper develops a graphical illustrative method to map the characteristics of action learning and related school effectiveness in practice in terms of profiles including the levels of thinking/creativity and types of thinking/creativity.