Joel Zehring

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.

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.

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