Joel Zehring

For a school to become a professional learning community, the employees of that building must develop shared mission, vision, values and goals. To do this, leaders must productively engage every employee in brutally honest discussion. If every single person doesn’t have a chance to chime in freely with suggestions, agreement, and disagreement, then the leaders fail.

Leaders must overcome two key hurdles: logistics and agreement.

Logistics

How do you listen to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people and consider all their viewpoints? How do you sustain large scale conversation? This is where computer-based tools for communication and aggregation can be especially helpful. If we’ve learned anything from the phenomena of Facebook and Twitter, we’ve learned that people are longing to participate in open discussion over topics that they care about.

Agreement

Everyone participating doesn’t mean that everyone has to spout out the same catch phrases right away (or at all). It means that through open, honest, sustained discourse, colleagues throughout the building or organization express, compare, and refine their beliefs and assumptions about learning and education.

One ultimate outcome of this discussion is the development of shared mission, vision, values, and goals.  These elements become the foundation for the culture of the organization, guiding all the activities and actions and discussions that occur on campus. The nitty-gritty, day-to-day policies and procedures of the school flow out of this set of shared and stated beliefs.

I say “ultimate outcome,” but what I really mean is “first draft.” For an organization to really thrive, all the employees must continually re-examine and refine their assumptions and beliefs about learning and education. Employees must remind each other of their shared beliefs all the time and question their own thoughts, words, and actions.

Here are two practical suggestions to facilitate the proces:

• Make sure to set up some simple conflict-resolution practices. When people talk about their deeply held beliefs, things can get heated.
• Ask really good questions. Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept is an invaluable framework for helping people to articulate their deeply held values and beliefs.

My plunge into Professional Learning Communities reminded me of some insightful comments by Shane Hipps, a former advertising mind for Porsche turned pastor in Phoenix, Arizona. Hipps spoke about authentic Christian community, but the principles and dynamics apply very closely to schools.

Via the video, authentic community depends on four critical components:

Shared history – Who we are together is defined by where we have been and what we have done together.

Proximity – This is the together part of shared history, but it’s not limited to spatial proximity. The factors of time and attention must also be included to add up to significant proximity.

Permanence – Longevity of the school building is not enough to nurture community. A core group of members must remain over a long enough period of time to build a tradition from shared beliefs and values.

Shared imagination of the future – It’s really challenging to get teachers to stay at a school, or even keep them in the profession. Engaging in open, sustained conversation about personal purpose and beliefs can lead a group of teachers to discover common traits in what they hope to do where they hope to go in their professional lives.

This certainly isn’t the only way to slice and dice community, but I think these four factors sum up the challenge for schools pretty clearly. If your school isn’t developing each of these traits continuously, then your community is like a shaky chair with wobbly legs.

YouTube – Shane Hipps NPC.

Many teachers are living a childhood fantasy: they are shepherding 20+ students each day through activities of academic, social, and emotional growth. Each student looks to the teacher as the final authority on nearly every decision in the classroom. Other teachers have escaped the stresses and disillusionment of the private sector so that they can “work with kids.”

These aren’t bad motivations to embark on a career as an educator. They’re just not sufficient for achieving professional results.  Here’s the rub: it takes more than a single teacher to grow a twenty-first century student.

The fundamental assumption of professional learning communities is this: students grow more when teachers work together toward a common goal. Many teachers, however, did not sign up to work with other teachers.

Is it possible to convince teachers that a cohesive community is better for students than a bunch of isolated teachers in individual classrooms?

I’ve been elbow-deep in PLCs this week, and I’m receiving a world-class education on the model. Dr. Rick DuFour has been incredibly gracious and responsive to the questions and comments from all the participants, even my half-baked remarks. Bill Ferritter, the host of the conversation (and the author of a new PLC book), has contributed with encouragement toward every participant and even made some rather raw confessions about his own practice. It’s amazing and inspiring to hear such honest reflection from a North Carolina teacher of  the year.

Several key ideas stand out in my mind so far:

• For all the emphasis on standardization, high stakes testing, and common assessment in the popular discourse education, DuFour is really promoting a balanced approach to assessment. We need both standard and individualized assessments to really know what students know.
• Technology will be our friend. Eventually.  I seem to remember Rick mentioning technology as a catalyst for improvements in student achievement. However, both DuFour and Ferritter mentioned that computer software needs to gain in quality and sophistication before teachers and students can realize their full benefits in a Professional Learning Community.
• They don’t call them communities for nothing. Dr. DuFour explained in very clear terms the reasoning behind the selection of the word “Communities” in the title of his groundbreaking book and model: it’s about people and their values and beliefs, not just structures and efficiency.

I know I dogged VoiceThread for being clunky and slow, but I’m enjoying the the tool more and more. Despite VT’s minor shortcomings (no RSS, crashes my system), I’ve found myself planning the times when I can check back to read and listen and watch new comments and questions. I can only blame the crashy-ness on Adobe and my dinosaur of a PowerBook.

VoiceThread - Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at work

Bill Ferritter is hosting an online discussion with Rick and Becky DuFour, the creators of the Professional Learning Community model. It’s definitely helped me to develop a more balanced view of PLCs in schools and how they might function to improve student achievement. While I don’t yet consider myself a PLC fanboy, I do agree that breaking down the isolators between educators in the same building remains the single best way to improve student achievement. Look for the Wiimote avatar to view my text comments.

As for Voicethread, I’m not sold. It feels a little clunky, but I definitely see the benefit of audio and text intermingling for conversation. I posted all my comments as text because my son was sleeping, and I think overall, I prefer the speed of reading to the fidelty of audio. I’m happy to interact with Voicethread, but I’m not itching to use it for my own projects or use it in my classroom yet.

VoiceThread - Revisiting PLCs at Work

Dan Pink asserts in this video that the modern workplace will thrive on three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

I especially like the idea of a FedEx day. What if teachers the district were given a full day to work on anything they wanted? We’d only need one rule:

You have to present your creation to the rest of the staff at the end of the day.

This kind of self-directed development reminds me of the Idea Stock Market that I wrote about a while back. With any luck (and leadership), the days of stale, stagnant professional development are numbered.