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Booklet 2 Creating and sustaining an effective professional learning community Professional Learning Communities: source materials for school leaders and other leaders of professional learning Louise Stoll, Ray Bolam, Agnes McMahon, Sally Thomas, Mike Wallace, Angela Greenwood and Kate Hawkey Familiarisation and deepening understanding

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Page 1: Creating and sustaining an effective professional learning ...dera.ioe.ac.uk/16498/1/professional-learning-communities-05... · Booklet 2 Creating and sustaining an effective professional

Booklet 2

Creating andsustaining an effective professionallearning community

Professional Learning Communities:source materials for school leaders andother leaders of professional learning

Louise Stoll, Ray Bolam, Agnes McMahon, Sally Thomas, Mike Wallace, Angela Greenwood and Kate Hawkey

Familiarisation and deepening understanding

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A. External facilitators and inhibitors Influencing the school staff’s capacity to develop and sustain an effective PLC

B. Internal facilitators and inhibitors Influencing the school staff’s capacity to develop and sustain an effective PLC

Provisional model of a school operating as an effective professional learning community

Shared values and vision Collective responsibility for pupils’ learning Collaboration focused on learning

Group as well as individual professional learning Reflective professional enquiry

Openness, networks and partnerships

Inclusive membership

Mutual trust, respect and support

D. Characteristics

Pupil learning and social development

Staff morale and practicewith potential for developing leadership capacity

The characteristics are in place and processes are operating smoothly

E. Outcomes

Optimising resources and structures to promote the PLC

Promoting professional learning Evaluating and sustaining the PLC

Leading and managingto promote the PLC

C. Processes

Model of a school operating as an effective professionallearning community (PLC)

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A belief that the quality of learning and teaching can beenhanced by teachers working and learning together hasled to increased interest in the potential of professionallearning communities (PLCs) for school improvement. But what exactly is a professional learning community?How would we recognise that a school was a learningcommunity? More importantly, if staff decide that theywant to develop and sustain their school as a learningcommunity, what can they do to achieve this?

In this piece we discuss these questions bydrawing on the findings of a study, Creatingand Sustaining Effective Professional LearningCommunities, funded by the Department forEducation and Skills (DfES), National College forSchool Leadership (NCSL) and General TeachingCouncil for England (GTCe), which was carriedout between January 2002 and October 2004.The aims of the study were to identify andprovide practical examples of:

• the characteristics of effective professionallearning communities and what these looklike in different school settings

• key factors inside and outside schools thatseem to help or hinder the initial creation,ongoing development and longer termsustaining of these communities

• innovative practices in managing humanand financial resources to create time andopportunity for professional learning anddevelopment and optimise its impact

In this think piece, we explore four questions.

1 What is a professional learning communityand how would you recognise one?

2 How do you create and develop aprofessional learning community?

3 Do PLCs go through different stages ofdevelopment?

4 How can you assess the effectiveness ofa professional learning community?

We also present a model of how we think it all fits together.

During the life of the project, we carried out four main research activities:

1 A review of the national and internationalliterature on PLCs.

2 A questionnaire survey administered to asample of nursery, primary, secondary and special schools across England.

3 Case studies in 16 schools around thecountry – 3 nursery (pre-school), 5 primary,5 secondary and 3 special schools – atdifferent stages of development asprofessional learning communities.

4 Workshops with representatives from case study schools.

Further details of the methods and ouranalysis can be found in the project report1.

Professional Learning Communities: source materials 3

1 Bolam, R, McMahon, A, Stoll, L, Thomas, S, & Wallace, M, with Greenwood, A, Hawkey, K,Ingram, M, Atkinson, A, & Smith, M, 2005, Creating and Sustaining Effective Professional LearningCommunities, DfES Research Report RR637, University of Bristol. Available atwww.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR637.pdf

What’s in this think piece?

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You may want to reflect on the followingquestions as you are reading, highlighting thetext if it helps. There are sheets at the end ofthe think piece for you to make notes aboutyour follow-up dialogue.

• Is the idea of a PLC one that you andcolleagues want to buy into? Why or why not?

• Is it one that will appeal to staff as a whole?Why or why not?

• Does it fit with your school developmentstrategy and your approach to self-evaluation?

• What are the broad implications forplanning and implementation?

• How might you introduce these ideas to other people?

• How helpful is the model of an effectivePLC?

• Can you come up with a more appropriatemodel for your PLC?

4 Professional Learning Communities: source materials

Questions to reflect on as you are reading

This was our working definition of a PLC:

An effective professional learning community has the capacity to promote and sustain thelearning of all professionals in the schoolcommunity with the collective purpose ofenhancing pupil learning.

Although PLCs don't look exactly the same in all schools, we found they display eightcharacteristics which, irrespective of phase or context, they exhibit to a greater or lesser degree:

1 shared values and vision2 collective responsibility for pupils’ learning3 reflective professional enquiry4 collaboration focused on learning5 group as well as individual professional

learning6 openness, networks and partnerships7 inclusive membership8 mutual trust, respect and support

Shared values and vision

Shared values and vision directed to thelearning of all pupils and shared across thewhole staff is a key characteristic of a PLC.Nursery, primary and special schools weremore likely than secondary schools to report

that nearly all staff shared a common core of educational values. In the much largersecondary schools, shared values were typicallyreported from the department or a smallergroup of staff rather than being school-wide.However, there were exceptions: in onesecondary school where efforts had been made to break down boundaries between staff teaching different subjects, the culturewas described as:

“…not one of a hierarchy of subjects but it isone that says learning… is a priority and will becelebrated whatever its form is and everybodyhas a part to play in that.”

This school’s senior leadership team wasencouraging staff to take a whole-school viewof learning, and tried to ensure that everypolicy emphasised teaching and learning. We found that staff were more likely to holdshared educational values and vision thanshared leadership and management values,implying that, although staff agreed about theaims and purposes of the school, there couldsometimes be disagreement about how best to achieve the learning goals.

1 What is a professional learning community and how would you recognise one?

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Collective responsibility for pupils’ learning

Staff sharing a sense of responsibility for thelearning of all pupils in the school is also a key characteristic. Again, we found this mostevident in the nursery and special schoolswhere teachers and support staff workedclosely together, monitoring and supportinggroups of students. The picture was ratherdifferent in some primary schools and thelarger secondary schools where collectiveresponsibility was more evident among staffteaching a particular subject or age group. Onesecondary headteacher commented that it waseasier for staff to take collective responsibilityfor learning when the school was successfulthan when it was experiencing difficulties.However, since the amount of data about pupilachievement available to staff has increasedenormously in recent years, it is now mucheasier to share information about the learningof all pupils. Typically, pupils are set individuallearning targets which are regularly monitored,and all staff are involved in discussions abouthow to better promote learning and raiseachievement. This in turn encourages a senseof collective responsibility.

Reflective professional enquiry

Another key characteristic is reflectiveprofessional enquiry. All the schools collecteddata and monitored pupil progress, but theydiffered in how the data were used. Some hadvery sophisticated mechanisms to provideteachers with detailed information, while inothers it was more informal. The data couldhighlight learning problems, and we wereinterested in how schools responded to this. We found numerous instances where staffwere experimenting to find ways to improvelearning and teaching. Examples included:

• conducting action research and otherresearch projects within the school

• collaborating with staff in other schools• setting and monitoring learning targets for

individual pupils• asking pupils’ opinion, for example about

what made a good lesson

Classroom observation was often cited as apowerful learning tool, and one secondarydeputy headteacher commented:

“The big leap that's been able to help us in thelast two or three years is people are no longerdefensive about being observed or interminglingwith each other. There's a whole new culture.”

Collaboration focused on learning

There are many examples of staff collaborationin activities focused on pupil learning andmutual professional learning, anothercharacteristic. These occur in all types ofschool. Examples include:

• teachers and support staff working togetherto plan teaching sessions or to discuss theprogress of individual pupils

• teachers in subject departments sharing thepreparation of curriculum materials andsharing learning resources by puttingmaterials on the school intranet

• an ICT teacher in a special school runningearly morning sessions to teach colleagueshow to use specific software programs thatwould help children with poor speech tocommunicate

• collaboration between staff in the care and education teams of a residential special school

Group as well as individual professionallearning

As you might expect, PLCs are characterised bya significant amount of planned and informalprofessional learning, both individual andcollective. A majority of the survey respondentsreported that most or nearly all teachers intheir schools “learn together with colleagues”,“take responsibility for their own learning” and“use performance management to enhanceprofessional learning”. In many schools, staffwere doing higher degrees, working onprojects, taking study visits or secondments andgoing on courses. A nursery headteacher gavean example of learning together:

“We've just recently had a music course becausethere was a special grant for musical instrumentsin deprived areas. We all went on the course…about a month into next term we will all have astaff meeting when we talk about somethingthat has gone well that we wouldn't have donebefore that course… if you do share ideas,someone will say, ‘This worked really well’ and

Professional Learning Communities: source materials 5

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someone else will say, ‘Oh yes, I remember that.I must try that with my group’.”

Openness, networks and partnerships

A key PLC characteristic is that staff are open to new ideas and ready to collaborate with thecommunity and with staff in other schools;they are not inward looking or defensive. The vast majority of our schools reportedformal working links with other schools. Theselinks were often very productive. One primaryheadteacher described how:

“We work together. We have a clusterimprovement plan and a shared budget whichwe can put into a pot which we can use fortraining and venues.”

A nursery headteacher reflected:

“Because we are small, we look for things outsideto evaluate us and make us think… If you aregood, you can still get better.”

Networks were used to share and generateideas, for example, primary teachers in oneschool observed colleagues in a neighbouringschool teaching pupils of the same age. Somestaff in small secondary school departmentswere particularly grateful for external networks to combat isolation:

“To develop your department you often have to go outside of the school. In my first year Ilearned a tremendous amount from being anexaminer and working with teachers from otherschools to moderate our pupils’ work.”

Community partnerships through children’scentres, youth services and other communityagencies were being developed in severalschools.

Inclusive membership

An important finding is that PLCs do not justinvolve teachers; in many cases all adultsworking in the school are members. Thisincludes teaching support staff, other supportstaff, the school governors or school councilmembers etc. The implications of this are quite considerable, not least because all the

members of the community need tounderstand the school’s values and goals. Wefound that teachers and learning assistants innursery and special schools worked especiallyclosely together, but examples of staff withdifferent types of job working together toachieve the aims of a particular PLC were not hard to find. A primary school teacherdescribing her school said:

“There’s no real pecking order. The beauty of thisplace is that everybody works as a team. There isno one who would say, ‘This job is far superiorto that one’, whether it be the headteacher orthe cleaner. They are all part of the same teamand it is a quality team.”

We found that secondary schools were ratherless inclusive, although there were examples of support staff working very closely withparticular subject departments.

Mutual trust, respect and support

PLCs are also characterised by trust and respectbetween colleagues and mutual support. Thisdoes not mean that staff necessarily all havestrong personal friendships, but if they aregoing to share classroom practice andexperiences, they need to be confident thatcolleagues will respond professionally.Challenge is important, but challenge withsupport. As a headteacher commented:

“Staff are our greatest resource. If you don’tcollaborate, co-operate, challenge and haverigorous expectations, they won't do their best…I have an official duty to care for them.”

A secondary teacher speaking about her school said:

“You're encouraged to take risks and be a bitmore creative and to work together and developand share good practice.”

A primary teacher spoke of her colleagues inthe following terms:

“Everybody is very positive. There's nobody in the school I don't feel able to approach in a professional or personal capacity.”

6 Professional Learning Communities: source materials

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We wanted to understand how staff werecreating and developing their professionallearning communities. Our evidence showedthat this isn't easy, but takes hard, sustainedwork over a number of years. Progress isn'tsmooth and a crisis of some sort or changes inschool personnel can mean that the PLC’sdevelopment is halted or indeed even reversed.Our research suggests that four broad processescontribute to creating and developing PLCs:

1 optimising resources and structures to promote the PLC

2 promoting professional learning3 evaluating and sustaining the professional

learning community over time4 leading and managing to promote PLC

development

Optimising resources and structures to promote the PLC

Decisions taken about how a school is organisedor how resources are allocated can have aprofound influence on PLC development. Theremay be factors over which staff have limitedcontrol, such as the quality of the buildings andthe number of school sites, but others, such asthe timetable and allocation of time forprofessional learning, reflect strategic decisionsand opportunities recognised and seized todevelop the PLC. The two main facilitators fordeveloping a PLC were time and money,reported by staff in all types of school. Whenthese factors were in short supply, the PLC’sdevelopment was inhibited. There werenumerous examples where staff collaborationwas facilitated by the timetable: science lessonsscheduled at the same time so staff could team-teach; or half an hour before the start of theteaching day; or a period at the day’s end beingallocated for joint planning or staff training.

Funding was often a key issue and some schoolswere proactive in seeking grants to help themimprove the school as a learning environmentor promote staff learning, for example througha teacher research scholarship. A primary schoolhead employed a building project manager so

her time wouldn't be diverted from what she saw as her core task:

“I couldn't concentrate on what I'm actually hereto do which is to encourage the teaching andlearning so we used money, and I’ve convincedthe governors that if we really want the school toimprove then we have to buy in expertise.”

Use of space was important. Whereas in smallnursery schools staff work together in one largeroom, in a large secondary school they mayrarely meet unless this is deliberatelyencouraged. Some secondary schools providedjoint work areas for teachers, in particularsubject groups or year teams. Making coffeeavailable in a shared staffroom encouraged staffto use it at break times, and short briefingmeetings at the start of the day brought peopletogether. Some schools located their pastoraloffices in the same area, facilitating exchangebetween heads of year. A secondary teacherdescribed her experience:

“Sharing is informal. It's all entirely chattingand informal stuff really. There's no gettingtogether to discuss how best to teach our kids ina formal way… For us it works, but I think a lotof the reason why it works is because all thescience labs are together and we've got that baseroom where we sit.”

One primary headteacher reorganised thephysical space to encourage collaboration,making classrooms into subject specialist bases.

Promoting professional learning

Professional learning is central to PLCdevelopment, and finding ways of promotingand organising learning opportunities was veryimportant. Continuing professionaldevelopment was often centrally co-ordinated,especially in larger schools, but practice variedbetween schools. Where it was plannedstrategically, professional developmentopportunities were informed by the schooldevelopment plan and staff performancemanagement systems. All of the project schools were making use of available external

2 How do you create and develop a professional learning community?

Professional Learning Communities: source materials 7

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opportunities for development, and encouragedstaff to attend external courses, althoughwithin-school professional development wasincreasingly favoured in some schools. Provisionwithin school was variable; there were examplesof good induction programmes, andprofessional development days providedopportunities for shared learning. There werealso interesting examples of attempts to supportstaff with transfer of learning (eg observationwith feedback and linked coaching), but thesewere less common.

Evaluating and sustaining the professionallearning community over time

Our project was not long enough to see howPLC development was sustained over a longperiod of time. The concept of a professionallearning community was discussed openly insome schools and deliberately developed, butin many cases the language of professionallearning communities was not used, althoughsenior staff were trying to promote itsdevelopment. Steps taken to promote andsustain PLC development included:

• making strategic staff appointments• coaching and mentoring individual teachers• enhancing professional learning in staff

meetings and INSET• working to improve the school environment

for learning

However, we found that schools rarelymonitored and evaluated the impact of

professional learning or the process of PLCoperation, which meant that follow-up actionwasn't always taken to maximise good practice.Where this did happen, development was moresustained.

Leading and managing to promote PLCdevelopment

Creating, developing and sustaining aprofessional learning community is a majorstrategic leadership and management task; thiswas a clear finding. There were consistentmessages across all our schools: the contributionof the head and senior staff was crucial, notleast in achieving positive working relationships.It was important to engender respect and createa culture where staff felt valued. Leaders alsoneeded to promote the focus on learning.Successful leaders had a clear sense of their ownvalues and vision, and the confidence to modelgood practice. Distributed leadership in variousforms was apparent in most schools, and severalheadteachers and senior staff providedmentoring and coaching support for leaders atdifferent levels. In some schools this meantgiving middle leaders a greater say in decision-making and promoting their responsibility forlearning. In others there were manyresponsibilities for all staff, for example chairingmeetings, leading learning projects, leadingprofessional development of colleagues andoverseeing ICT development across the school.All leaders sought to promote learning and, tovarying degrees, they saw a PLC as the way forward.

8 Professional Learning Communities: source materials

At the outset of the project, we hypothesisedthat a school might be at one of three stages asa PLC; starter, developer and mature. Our surveyrespondents and staff interviewed in the casestudy schools accepted these common-sensedistinctions and were able to say which stagethey considered their school had reached as aPLC. From the case studies we found a loosepositive association between the stage ofdevelopment and the extent of expression of theeight characteristics identified above, althoughthere were some exceptions to this pattern. Weconcluded from our data that PLCs in all types of English school are likely to exhibit the eight

characteristics, that they will do so to varyingdegrees, and that their profile on the eightcharacteristics will change over time ascircumstances change in each school2. It becameclear that the school context and setting had aprofound influence on how the schooldeveloped as a PLC and we concluded that,although PLCs have common characteristics and adopt similar processes, the practicalimplications for developing a PLC can only beunderstood and worked out in the specificconditions – such as phase, size and location –of particular contexts and settings.

3. Do PLCs go through different stages of development?

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Our findings suggest that a PLC should bejudged on three criteria.

The first criterion is its ultimate impact onpupil learning and social development. We view impact on pupils as the most importanteffectiveness indicator, although it is hard tomeasure. We found that a greater extent ofreported staff involvement in professional and pupil learning was linked to higher levelsof pupil performance and progress in bothprimary and secondary schools. Moreover, in secondary schools, where the extent ofinternal support for professional learning was reported to be greater, the level ofpupil progress was also higher.

The second criterion is its impact on staffpractice and morale. Morale improved in mostof the schools with more vibrant professionallearning communities. There were also manyexamples of an impact on teachers’ learningarising from individual and group professionallearning, and some professional learningopportunities clearly made teachers reflectmuch more deeply on their practice.

Summarising these first two measures ofeffectiveness, we suggest that impact cannotbe considered separately from purpose.Professional learning communities are ameans to an end; the goal is not just to be a professional learning community. A keypurpose of PLCs is to enhance staffeffectiveness as professionals, to the ultimatebenefit of pupils. This is why our project’sdefinition suggests that the ultimate outcomeof PLCs has to be experienced by pupils, eventhough there is an intermediate capacity-leveloutcome of promoting and sustaining thelearning of the professionals.

The third criterion is the extent to which thePLC is able to develop the PLC characteristicsand processes and sustain these over time.

2 An Audit activity in these source materials – Deciding where you are as a professional learning community, the implementation rubric – has been designed to help youanalyse your profile over time. See booklet 8.3 Elsewhere in these materials, we refer to ‘phases’ of PLC development which we view as less fixed than ‘stages’.4 See also User guide: getting started and thinking about your journey, the introduction to these source materials, for further discussion.

4. How can you assess the effectiveness of a PLC?

Putting it all together: a model of an effective PLC

Professional learning communities arecomplex. Although the idea that PLCs mightprogress through three stages of developmentwas initially useful to consider, our experienceled us to conclude that the distinctionsbetween PLCs are more subtle3. The provisionalmodel on the introductory page builds on ourfindings and portrays a PLC operating within aschool influenced by facilitators and inhibitorsthat operate both externally (Box A) andinternally (Box B), while unbroken arrowslinking the four processes (Box C) to the eightcharacteristics (Box D) and the three sets ofoutcomes (Box E) indicate a general directionof how a PLC operates and the impact it has.The arrows are not intended to imply asimplistic, one-way causal chain. The brokenarrows indicate that the features in each of the five boxes are more likely to be influencing each other in reciprocal ways.

Reflecting back on our findings, we wouldreiterate that:

An effective professional learning communityhas the capacity to promote and sustain thelearning of all professionals in the schoolcommunity with the collective purpose ofenhancing pupil learning.

We also would suggest that:

A professional learning community is aninclusive group of people, motivated by ashared learning vision, who support and work with each other, finding ways, inside and outside their immediate community, toenquire on their practice and together learnnew and better approaches that will enhance all pupils’ learning4.

Professional Learning Communities: source materials 9

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10 Professional Learning Communities: source materials

Questions for reflection and dialogue

Is the idea of a PLC one that you and colleagues want to buy into? Why or why not?

Is it one that will appeal to staff as a whole? Why or why not?

Does it fit with your school development strategy and your approach to self-evaluation?

What are the broad implications for planning and implementation?

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Questions for reflection and dialogue

How might you introduce these ideas to other people?

How helpful is the model of an effective PLC? (See the introductory page.)

Can you come up with a more appropriate model for your PLC?

Professional Learning Communities: source materials 11

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© Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Thomas, Wallace, Greenwood and Hawkey, 2006

National College forSchool LeadershipTriumph RoadNottingham NG8 1DH

T: 0870 001 1155F: 0115 872 2001E: [email protected]: www.ncsl.org.uk/nlc

General Teaching Council for England Whittington House19-30 Alfred PlaceLondon WC1E 7EA

T: 0870 001 0308F: 020 7023 3909E: [email protected]: www.gtce.org.uk

DfES Innovation UnitSanctuary BuildingsGreat Smith StreetLondon SW1P 3BT

T: 0870 000 2288E: [email protected]: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/innovation-unit

Effective Professional Learning Communities University of BristolGraduate School of Education8-10 Berkeley SquareBristolBS8 1HH

W: www.eplc.info

Familiarisation and deepening understanding

Creating and sustaining an effective professional learning community

Setting professional learning communities in an international context

Broadening the learning community: key messages

Exploring the idea of professional learning communities

To order a copy of this publication, please email [email protected] quoting reference number DfES-0187-2006 or download from www.ncsl.org.uk/nlcwww.standards.dfes.gov.uk/innovation-unitwww.gtce.org.uk

DfES-0187-2006