Professional Learning Communities that Reach Outside the School

Over on Dangerously Irrelevant Scott links to the latest version of the National Staff Development Council Standards or Staff Development  which notes, effective staff development:

 

• has small groups of educators working together over time in professional learning communities;
• is based on principles of effective adult learning; and
• deepens educators’ content knowledge.

According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory,

The term professional learning community describes a collegial group of administrators and school staff who are united in their commitment to student   learning. They share a vision, work and learn collaboratively, visit and review   other classrooms, and participate in decision making (Hord, 1997b). The benefits   to the staff and students include a reduced isolation of teachers, better informed   and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. Hord (1997b) notes,   "As an organizational arrangement, the professional learning community is seen as a powerful staff-development approach and a potent strategy for school change and improvement.

Human Capital and Creativity

The demands of the 21st Century has created a need for schools to become learning organizations that focus on developing human capital and creativity in their teachers to prepare them for changing the educational landscape. Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline describes a learning organization as a place "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together" (Senge,1990,p. 3). Unfortunately, most schools simply aren't there.

Wisdom of the Teacher
Roland Barth dares to discuss "the elephant in the room" a  recent Educational Leadership article (March 2006)  by which he means the various ways educators compete with and isolate themselves from one another. "Relationships among educators within a school range from vigorously healthy to dangerously competitive. Strengthen those relationships, and you improve professional practice."  One way to strengthen relationships is through meaningful collaboration around a common task or shared vision.

School culture is such that it often under utilizes and underestimates the wisdom of teachers in terms of school improvement and school reform. Rather than create professional development experiences that tap what teachers know and help them to develop their professional voice, teachers are often removed from the decision making process that directly affects classroom practice and professional growth opportunities.

However, through networks—both physical and virtual— teachers are beginning to draw on external communities that promote divergent thinking. Some of these virtual networks develop into powerful learning communities that connect the ideas of educators from around the world as they explore together and push traditional education boundaries.

Relationships are Key to Change
Collegiality builds relationships. I personally belong to several of these external virtual learning communities and value the relationships I have cultivated there. For example, as Steve Dembo demonstrates within the twitter community there is a great deal for educators to learn from each other. Often, someone will throw out a need, only to have it met within minutes by several different members of the community. Though twitter we laugh together and sometimes offer prayer and words of encouragement- all part of the trust building that occurs in a community of practice. I also am a part of several Ning communities, Tapped In communities, Flickr groups, listservs, and the edublogospshere. All having their own flavor of community and each helping me to grow in my knowledge and further refine my online voice.

Something Seems to Be Missing
What is lacking though is the link from my external community to the  professional learning communities in schools. Teachers need to experience the same kind of collegiality within PLCs made up of their on site colleagues as they do out on the Web. Virtual learning communities can work just as well as a tool that connects colleagues who are together under the same roof as it does to bring educators together from around the world.

PD providers in a school or district should consider using virtual learning communities as a way to allow for anytime, anyplace development of personal learning networks. Teams of teachers within a school could collaborate and learn together with other diverse thinking educators from around the world. This type of professional learning community would allow for job embedded professional development that was shaped from a global perspective. In this setting, teachers could develop a change agent perspective and a voice in educational reform.

Change vs Control
This of course is very scary stuff for traditional education, steeped in the formal structures of the past. If teachers know how to lead, how to be effective in evoking change, then that creates problems. Teachers start asking questions. Things get messy. We awaken the sleeping giant and change is no longer incremental and controllable.

I use to say, "Change takes time." Well look around you, change no longer takes time, in fact change is happening at exponential rates. The challenge is to adapt to the rapid pace of change before as an institution we find ourselves irrelevant in the lives of the students we seek to help.

Comments

[Derek]

Excellent post Sheryl - interesting to see how the same messages keep on appearing in our approach.

Back in 1999 I came across the following... “What teachers really need is in-depth, sustained assistance as they work to integrate computer use into the curriculum and confront the tension between traditional methods of instruction and new pedagogic methods that make extensive use of technology.”(CEO Report, 1999 http://www.ceoforum.org)

Here we see it again - the emphasis on PD that is in-depth, sustained and confronting existing pedagogical beliefs - confirming Scott's first point about groups working together over time.

I see a couple of problems that we need to address in order to really capture the value of these statements:

1 - we need to de-emphasise the proliferation of short-term, one-off "training" style PD experiences that we still see proliferating (often as a result of the funding arrangements that are available), and

2 - we need to find ways of valuing and recognising the learning that takes place in these (often informal) communities (ie through blogs, forums etc) which at present tends to be regarded as an "extra" rather than the core of PD.

[Sarah Stewart]

Hi Sheryl, I really enjoyed your post. I believe that you are right about the challenge to traditional education, especially in tertiary settings. You don't need me to tell you that when the status quo is challenged by alternative ways of thinking and learning, people feel threatened because they believe their are going to lose their power and control over students and colleagues. I find it very sad that some educators are unprepared to explore alternative ways of learning/teaching and dismiss out of hand the potential of social networking without even as much as looking at it. kia ora Sarah

[Nancy White]

I love the image of IN and OUT. Good stuff.

[Tyler Fonda]

Interesting thoughts Sheryl. I think that one of the reasons that you don't see PD providers moving to a network model is that it won't explicitly support their business model.

An efficient information exchange linking teachers to appropriate content and strategies would make formalized PD of less import. A social network deemphasizes global expertise because it efficiently links to pockets of micro-expertise. These pockets can dispense advice cost-effectively because there is a limited time commitment to sharing this information and therefore the benefit of sharing outweighs the cost.

In order to unleash this torrent of micro-expertise a platform must provide a simple, efficient way to distribute information. Time is of the essence, as witnessed by Google relentless focus on delivering quick search results. If the time commitment is small or non-existent a culture of sharing will breakthrough.

It's what we're working on with PlansForUs and we'll get there.

[Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach]

Derek,

Great quote from the CEO Report.

I was impressed while studying for my COMPS that even after Brown vs the Board of Educ here in the states that said "separate isn't equal" school integration didn't take place until the 1970s, almost 20 years after the Brown v. Board decision was handed down.

John Seely Brown says it took 20 or 50 years for electrification to take hold and for society to enact new social practices that leveraged the potential of that infrastructure. And so it will be for the Web.

My wonderment is around the incremental nature of change and how that concept in itself is changing as knowledge is increasing more rapidly. Incremental will not work in this fast pace society--talk about left behind!

I really agree with your number 2 above. That is key.

[Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach]

Tyler are you familiar with the work I am doing in Alabama? As a PD provider, I worked with Alabama Best Practice Center to provide just such an experience.

http://abpc21.org check it out.

[Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach]

Sarah,

You said, "You don't need me to tell you that when the status quo is challenged by alternative ways of thinking and learning, people feel threatened because they believe their are going to lose their power and control over students and colleagues."

Educational policy is like all policy in that it is about managing power conflicts. Typically, the process of change takes time because of this aspect. The interesting thing to me is we are coming full circle in education. Soon learning once again will be all about community, as it was in the day of Socrates, and there will be little that most institutions can do about it- but embrace it or be rendered useless.

[Anne Jolly]

This comment from your Oct. 1 entry hit home . . .
"Teams of teachers within a school could collaborate and learn together with other diverse thinking educators from around the world. This type of professional learning community would allow for job embedded professional development that was shaped from a global perspective."

This is right on target. It's the "how to" that lies at the heart of the issues. How to get teachers to see the need . . . how to get teachers to begin utilizing technology in this way . . . how to get teachers to even know that technology is there to accomplish this. Thanks for the posting.

[Patty]

Sheryl,
Thanks so much for these comments. I am especially appreciative of your references to Hord and Senge. I will look these up and check them out. Our district is modeling all PLCs after Dufour. They have great materials but when PLCs are formed by teachers and support personnel other than the "classroom teacher" of elementary or the "subject area" teacher in high school the model needs some flexibility. All of us need a vehicle to help children learn at our schools. Thanks again for the best info I've had on this for 2007.

[Marsha]

Whenever you start quoting Senge's work, I'm all for it. To me the things he has written about in terms of thinking systematically are BIG. Big for the power that a PLC could leverage if we were able to start thinking from a systems perspective. Big if we could look outside our own experience to others realizing that organizational issues abound in all kinds of occupations. Let's be smart about our reform work...take note of what has worked elsewhere and what hasn't...find the threads of commonality...and apply those to our environment.

It would give us great vision...and the ability to think and take action from more than our own limited spot in the hierarchy. I think it would also give our administrators a reason to believe that handing over some of their power to teachers would be a good thing. My clamping down, removing the ability to create and grow, district are really diminishing their great potential asset. The power of teachers to think creatively and design things that haven't been thought about yet.

It's back to those systems ideas...if one piece of your system is hampered and ineffective...the whole thing is hindered from finding greatness.

[TeachMoore]

Sheryl, I like the idea of using virtual networks as part of PD within schools and districts. Could you expand on that some more? For example, do you envision having the teachers within a school or a department become part of a larger (national/global) virtual network as a way to open themselves up not only to the ideas on that network, but also to each other?

Do you have examples of this from your work in AL?

[Martha Rankin]

Thank you for talking about the power of virtual professional learning communities. We're building an e-PLC in adult education. Please check out "Adult Education Matters."