Joel Zehring

I just finished talking with a student teacher who is wrapping up her “take-over” time in second grade. Now that she’s off active duty for a few weeks, she’s checking out other classrooms before finishing out the semester. Of course, I welcomed her to visit, with one request.

Give me feedback on my class, my lesson, my interaction with my students, and anything else you observe.

Constructive feedback based on empirical observation is hard to come by in elementary education. I’m going to request it from whomever I can. Plus, this teacher-in-training may have some insights and suggestions that are new to me. The trenches of teaching aren’t always conducive to researching new practices.

As a bonus, the student teacher gets to experience a little bit of real professional learning community. Instead of being talked down to, she gets to flex her collaboration muscles and contribute to my students’ learning by helping me to run a better class.

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.

I’ve just finished the book that started it all; the PLC Bible, if you will. Professional Learning Communities at Work feels like the education version of Good to Great. It’s not quite up to par with Jim Collins’s canonical business success book, but PLCs at Work is very good. Some points that stood out to me:

• A school is a PLC (p.23). Previously, I was informed that collaborative teams and teachers in grade levels were PLCs. Calling a collaborative team a PLC is a like saying Arizona is the entire United States.
• “Shaping culture is not a task to complete; rather it is an ongoing commitment” (p. 148).
• Professional development should develop organizational capacity, not just individual teacher skills (p. 261).
• PLC is a passionate, non-linear, persistent process.

I wonder what percentage of teachers and admins currently working on PLC roll outs have read this book? How many educators have received the Good News of PLCs second-hand, from a well-intentioned district leader or a one-day-wonder inservice speaker?

I don’t see why this book shouldn’t be the subject of the first book study that any school staff completes as they begin to develop a PLC. I know I would have jumped on the PLC bandwagon a long time ago if someone would have just handed me this book.

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.