Joel Zehring

Democracy is a brutally efficient system for stamping out less-than-popular ideas. It’s far less useful for making wise decisions that perpetuate improvement and renewal.

For a professional learning community, consensus beats democracy left and right. Here’s what I mean by consensus: if one member of the community can’t live with a choice and it’s consequences, then we don’t move forward. We take more time to listen, discuss, and persuade, or we find an alternate option that everyone can approve.

Consensus-rule values all members equally, all the time. There is no majority and minority. There are no winners and losers. No one gets left behind.

Through consensus, every member is consulted, and every member enjoys veto power. We don’t move forward unless “we” includes every single member. Bonus: later on, when things get tough, no one can say “I never wanted to do this in the first place,” because each member had a chance to stop the train before it left the station.

Consensus honors the spirit of Galileo in the community. At some point, the future of the community may depend on a lone voice of reason among the choruses of “we’ve always done it this way” and “trust us, this many people can’t be wrong.” How many times in history has the pivotal realization been championed by a single person or small collective of dissidents? How many times in history has the ruling faction actually worked to suppress sanity and reason to preserve the status quo?

If my first allegiance is to the community, and my community is committed to consensus, then the best and most sane answer will almost always win out. It just might take a lot longer than the five minute slot on the staff meeting agenda.

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.

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.