Joel Zehring

Students love good video games for two reasons:

• They present contextualized, actionable problems.
• They deliver immediate, logical feedback based on player actions.

I wish I could say the same for the typical public school class. Too often, students wait  days or even weeks  to get feedback on assignments that are standards-based but devoid of any context or over-arching story.

Two questions:

• How can I incorporate these core characteristics of good video games into my classroom?
• Are there any educational video games that incorporate these core characteristics? Do these games allow teachers to track student progress simply and authentically?

Scot McCleod had some insightful points about the value of video games in this post: Video games and learning: Individualization, simulation, and complexity.

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.

Planting and nurturing a healthy professional learning community requires that every teacher (and employee) in a building arrive at three conclusions:

1. I am a professional. My mission is to ensure learning at high levels for every student, measurable by objective evidence.
2. I learn and I help others learn. My students learn more when I collaborate and learn with other teachers, sharing strategies and comparing evidence.
3. My school is a community, greater than the sum of its parts. It is built out of collaborative teams and disciplined professionals that share and learn from their failures and successes.

It’s not enough to adopt two out of the three conclusions. It’s all or nothing.

Because these conclusions aren’t just benign, buzzword statements, adoption can be pretty arduous. Teachers need time and patience to hash through the implications of these terms with other teachers.

Teachers need time to air their concerns, fears, and insecurities before they really assimilate these beliefs.

Teachers need time to struggle and even fight through the process of letting go of longer-standing beliefs that conflict with these conclusions, without feeling like they’re forfeiting their souls and their individuality.

For leaders, the whole process is less like building a tract house, and more like planting and growing a forest. It takes strategy and experience, nurturing and pruning, and time.

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?