Learning from Successes and Failures through Organizational Climate in A Non-Formal Education – Youth Council

This workshop based on a research examined learning processes in a non-formal education framework, with an emphasis on learning from the successes and failures of a youth leadership group, youth council. The learning processes were examined with an affinity to management of the organizational climate in the studied group. Research studies have found that unsuccessful activities create a need to learn from the failure, but undermine the learner’s confidence to learn (Schechter, 2010). However, Ellis et al. (2006) contend that the positive impact of learning from success also paves the way to learning from mistakes. Organizational climate management, by providing conditions for successful learning (Rosenfeld, Sykes, Dolev & Weiss, 2002) also providing conditions for learning from failures.

The non-formal organizational climate is defined as possessing distinctive traits (Kahane, 2004) that develops youth leadership and positions individuals at the center of learning (Rosenblom & Hermon, N.D.) We therefore examined municipal youth council, to identify characteristics of learning from successes and failures in that climate.

The findings of the Organizational climate including the values of the municipal youth council, which have non-formal characteristics according to the theory of Kahane (2004), Raz’s model (2004) and the theory of Schein (1985).

The findings of this research are supported in the literature, which maintains that organizational climate management in non-formal education promotes learning from successes and failures (Lamm, 1974; Kahane 1997, 2004).

The conclusions of the research reinforce the importance of organizational climate management in a non-formal framework, and its contribution to learning by managing organizational climate that both promotes successes and enables learning from failures. The contribution of this research is that it identifies the collective capacity as a characteristic unique to this social-educational framework that grants the group a sense of resilience.