Professional Learning Communities:
Improving Student and Adult Learning
School change is complicated and challenging, especially for the educators who work with students every day. Building and sustaining the work of school practitioners as members of professional learning communities can support educators who are pursuing significant change, in new and substantive ways.
The work of professional learning communities promotes the values of reflective practice, collaboration, shared leadership, authentic pedagogy, democracy, and equity in opportunity and achievement. With quality training and on-going site-based, job-embedded support all of these values can serve as powerful leverage points to improve teacher quality and increase achievement for all students.
Changing the Way Adults Work in Schools
As a profession, teachers and administrators are not practiced, encouraged, or rewarded for publicly examining their work or that of their students’. Moreover, the culture of schools offers few opportunities for substantive professional collaboration designed to change teacher practice to increase student achievement.
A professional learning community consists of a group of teachers and administrators who agree to work regularly together to produce improved student achievement. As a group, the members establish and publicly state student learning goals, help each other think about better teaching practices, look closely at curriculum and student work, and identify school-wide issues that affect student achievement.
A professional learning community is facilitated by a coach who is selected either from the school staff or from the ranks of trusted outsiders. The coach helps the group build a sense of trust that must exist if they are to work together in a direct, honest, and productive way. The coach also helps the members learn and master techniques that sharpen self-insight, promote creativity and rigor, and encourage candid, usable peer feedback.
Professional learning communities derive from a simple idea, but that doesn't mean they are easy to create or manage. They require significant commitment—on the part of teachers, coaches, and administrators. Thoughtful critique of teacher practice may provoke important changes in classroom and school-wide practices, but it is difficult to ask hard questions, open classrooms to constructive scrutiny, and explore with colleagues the nuances and assumptions of one’s own practice. It takes time to learn these unfamiliar skills and requires a commitment from leadership to develop school cultures where students and educators are constantly learning and improving.
Time, Privacy, and Professional Development
What happens during a school day and when it happens, send powerful messages about our educational priorities. So, too, do the provisions we make for educators’ professional development. Traditional norms of time, privacy, and professional development embedded in the culture of schools are powerful obstacles to meaningful, student-focused change. The work of professional learning communities is purposely designed to loosen the grip of these traditions by making teaching public and thus changing the ways adults work in schools.
Critical Elements
Building and sustaining professional learning communities in schools requires the close and purposeful alignment of several key elements:
Structure:
Every group of adults functions as a permanent school/center improvement team—Grade Level Teams, Vertical Teams, Subject-Area Teams, Leadership Teams, et al. These groups develop the capacity to engage in substantive collaboration within and across groups to address both short and long-term goals.
Content:
The content of the work adults will do is set by the Guiding Instructional Principles:
- All children can learn
- Teach students to use their minds well
- Focus on results
- Development of understanding vs. quantity of coverage
- Students as active learners
- Relationships as the key ingredient to teaching and learning
- Appreciation for cultural and socioeconomic diversity
Process:
Adults engage in on-going, site-based, facilitated collaboration employing a variety of processes or protocols designed to assist all adults—teachers, parents, administrators, other school staff members to:
- Develop the habit of reflective practice
- Make practice public
- Support each other’s learning
- Adapt practice in ways that increase success for all children
Conditions:
Adults actively and intentionally set about creating and sustaining conditions that enable all members of the school to take risks, pose questions, support each other’s learning, serve as advocates for each other’s success—in effect, to work as members of a learning organization. Principal leadership is vital to establishing the conditions and sustaining a culture where learning communities thrive.
Outcomes:
Professional learning communities provide a powerful and proven means to increase student achievement and improve educator practice and school performance.
