MEDD8937 Chap.6 Professional Learning Communities
Professional Learning Communities
A definition that reads as a specification
Collaborative professionalism names the joint work by which teachers and their colleagues change what happens in classrooms so that every student can build a worthwhile life.
The published account attaches four conditions to that work: planning done rigorously, dialogue that is deep and at times uncomfortable, feedback that is frank without being destructive, and inquiry pursued together and without an end date.
It also insists that the work be informed by evidence without the numbers being allowed to run it, and it is that last qualification, rather than the word collaboration, that settles most arguments about what a community owes its district.
Teachers become members of a professional learning community by meeting, sharing and working together for professional enhancement rather than by being placed in one.
Three core principles, and what each demands in writing
Ensuring student learning means the teachers committing as a group to a high standard for each student and settling together what each student should learn, how the team will know when each has learned it, and how it will respond when a student has trouble.
A culture of collaboration means colleagues working as a group, in an organised way, to examine classroom practice and improve it, through a cycle of inquiry that keeps running focused on crucial questions about learning, using action research to achieve better results.
A focus on results means effectiveness being judged on student achievement, with teams setting goals about student learning, working together to reach them, providing evidence of progress and turning data into actionable information.
A community that cannot name the goal, the evidence and the response to failure has a meeting rather than a community.
What a team gives that an individual cannot
The session sets the individual and the team against each other on five dimensions: how needs and gaps are identified, what success is based on, how teacher bias about student learning is checked, what limits instructional practice, and how professional learning happens.
The third is the only claim an individual teacher cannot meet however skilled she is, because bias toward student learning stays unchecked where the available data comes from one perspective.
Alongside this sit three success conditions grouped as leadership, covering an agreed mission with goals attached, expectations everyone holds, leadership spread widely and colleagues deciding things together; activities, covering shared practice and peer observation, collective and reflective dialogue and collective inquiry; and culture, covering a shared value system, a climate of trust and shared adult accountability.
The inquiry cycle, and two ways to build a community
The cycle runs plan, do, study, act, and each stage carries its published questions, ending with whether the evidence suggests adopting, adapting or abandoning the plan.
Four question types support the dialogue: exploring possibility, balancing participation, seeking to understand and encouraging participation. The session then contrasts two ways of realising five principles of implementation.
The bureaucratic approach mandates communities and records attendance, benchmarks test gains and sanctions, uses incentives for course taking, requires documented plans and uses the threat of sanction, and produces compliance, resistance and anxiety.
The professional approach models collaboration and builds skills, develops multiple measures and formative assessment with protocols for looking at student work, funds time and skilled facilitators, creates trust and rewards outcomes, and produces enthusiasm, cooperation and wait-and-see participation.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Collaborative professionalism, clause by clause
- 02
Ensuring student learning as three questions a team must answer
- 03
A culture of collaboration as an ongoing cycle of inquiry
- 04
A focus on results, and what counts as evidence of progress
- 05
Individual against team on five dimensions
- 06
Leadership, activities and culture as success conditions
- 07
The four stages of the inquiry cycle and their questions
- 08
Four types of question a facilitator can deliberately choose
- 09
Bureaucratic and professional routes to the same five principles
Judge a year of meetings against the three core principles
- 3Test the evidence against each of the three principles in turn.
- 3State what the school actually built.
- 3Name the smallest change that would move it, and why.
Key terms
- Collaborative Professionalism
- Joint work by which colleagues change classroom practice together under four stated conditions: rigorous planning, deep dialogue, frank feedback and inquiry without an end date, informed by evidence but not run by numbers.
- Professional Learning Community
- A group of educators who meet, share and collaborate regularly for professional enhancement, judged on whether student learning is ensured, collaboration is systematic and results are used.
- Collective Inquiry
- A shared cycle in which a team analyses and improves classroom practice by testing a change against evidence, rather than exchanging opinions about practice.
- Inquiry Cycle
- The four-stage sequence of planning a change and its data, carrying it out, studying the results against a baseline, and deciding whether to adopt, adapt or abandon.
- Bureaucratic Approach
- A way of building communities through mandate, recorded attendance, benchmarks, sanctions and required documentation, associated with compliance, resistance and anxiety.
- Professional Approach
- A way of building communities through modelled collaboration, multiple measures, funded time, skilled facilitators, trust and rewarded outcomes, associated with enthusiasm and cooperation.
- Mutual Accountability
- The condition in which all members of a team are answerable for common outcomes, which can be engendered through trust and internal assessment or demanded through documentation and sanction.
Professional Learning Communities FAQ
How do I tell a professional learning community from a regular meeting?
Look for the three principles rather than for the label. Ask whether the team has agreed what students should learn and how it will know, whether any change was tested and returned to, and whether a goal exists that evidence could bear on. A team can meet weekly for a year, keep excellent minutes and satisfy none of the three, which is a finding about design rather than about commitment.
Why does the word abandon matter in the inquiry cycle?
Because teams that run the cycle almost always report adopting or adapting and almost never abandoning, which is implausible over many cycles. The usual cause is that nobody wrote down at the planning stage what result would count as failure, so no evidence can produce that verdict later. Writing the abandon condition first gives the cycle the property that makes it worth the meeting time, which is that it can be wrong.
Can a district use both the bureaucratic and the professional route?
It can, and the mixture is itself diagnostic. Funding release time and hiring skilled facilitators are professional moves; requiring documented plans showing how benchmarks will be met is a bureaucratic one.
The predicted teacher responses differ, so a district doing both should expect enthusiasm about the facilitators alongside ritual compliance in the paperwork, and the practical fix is to let the plan be written for the team rather than for the district.
Assessment move
Take the minutes of any team you sit on and mark every item as planning, coordination or inquiry. The proportions are usually startling, and the exercise gives you a concrete diagnosis to use in the monitoring section of your own implementation plan rather than a general claim about collaboration.
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