When it comes to promoting the beliefs of professional learning community, what you say is important. How you say it is even more important.
Despite the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan’s words, administrators and district leaders continue to promote community through staff meetings, prescribed agendas, assigned readings, and mass emails. It’s no wonder teachers are hesitant to buy in to the PLC model. Just before the principal touts it, the teachers find out that they are losing their prep periods to a district in-service meeting.
To teachers on the receiving end of this kind of corporate propagandizing, professional learning community is simply another item to check off the list, rather than a powerful framework for redefining school in the twenty-first century. Schedules, agendas, tasks, and assignments are not necessarily bad things, but they are not sufficient for building vibrant professional learning community.
Community, even among professional learners, is organic and human and messy. It does not always fit nicely in a bullet point on an agenda, nor does it stop when a meeting is concluded.
The PLC message must be proclaimed through the media of community. Community is forged through questions, conversations, laughter, conflict, forgiveness, vulnerability, and patience. It is born out of proximity, permanence, shared history, and shared vision. Community requires more than passive attendance. Professional learning community demands passionate engagement from every member, and long-suffering empathy from every leader.
Interesting post, Joel—and one that resonates with me considering the work that I do with (and on) professional learning teams.
One bit of push back for you: Many professional learning teams really need the kind of structure and handouts that you’re describing here. The organic nature of community development—-which you’re right, is messy—can completely overwhelm novice learning teams.
Left in a room with little guidance, they flounder—either focusing on the wrong things or nothing at all. For those teams, PLCs end up becoming an even greater waste of time….and for those teams, structure provides clear direction and opportunities to feel progress: “We completed our team norms worksheet! Cool. What’s next?”
For advanced learning teams—-and for sophisticated teachers working on novice learning teams—-these structures can be restrictive and frustrating, making learning teams feel prepackaged and “fake.” That’s probably the group that you fall into.
In the end, the error here is in the way that PLC work is rolled out in schools and districts. Administrators—who are as overworked as we are—don’t have the time, skill, or experience to manage teams at different stages of development, so they take a “one-size fits all” approach to learning teams as a survival strategy.
Any of this make sense?
Bill