“When people have a passion and a purpose that is theirs, not someone else’s, and when their passion is pursued together and is sharpened by a sense of urgency, there are no limits to what they can achieve.”

Hargreaves and Frink (2006)

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A Professional Development Cycle

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As teachers wait, endlessly for the right research or staff development program…

Consider this: Our schools perform at current levels,

despite immense challenges What would happen if we redirected all

this heart and energy into simple, proven practices: systematically identifying, cultivating, refining, and honoring the vast untapped fund of collective expertise already in our midst – and celebrating each small instructional victory, one at a time?

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Forty Years of Reform Strategies 1970’s uninformed professional

judgment 1980’s uninformed prescription 1990’s informed prescription 2000’s informed professional

judgment

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Informed Professional Judgment Professional judgment involves groups

of teachers and others who value difference, disagreement, and debate over the best ways to identify and implement needed improvements.

It’s about how teachers promote, value, and bring together formal evidence and experiential knowledge and intuition as a basis for decision-making.

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A Professional Learning Community is… A community where diverse people have

a shared commitment to a common purpose. Communities support each other in pursuing goals and acknowledge and include all views. The communities focus on…

learning of the students, the adults, and the organization. These learning communities are…

professional in how they value deliberation and discussion.

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Groupthink Many groups that have been labeled PLC’s

are not because members are more interested in being nice to one another than probing deeply into issues that sometimes divide education.

Like all communities, learning communities can become victims of “groupthink,” where members insulate themselves from alternative ideas – turning shared visions into shared delusions

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Double-Loop Learning: An Alternative to Groupthink A thermostat is a single-loop learner. It

is programmed to increase or decrease heat in order to keep temperature constant.

A thermostat could be a double-loop learner if it could inquire why it should measure heat and why it is set so that the temperature is constant. It is inquiring into underlying values.

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Thermostats?!? Twinning the Portman bridge to handle the

traffic-flow into Vancouver is an example of single-loop learning.

Studies have shown that when congestion is relieved initially by building roads or bridges, there is a 30% (more people move to the suburbs) increase in travel, which in turn leads to more congestion, and air and noise pollution than before the road building. Questioning the value of fucusing on traffic flow is an example of double-loop learning.

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What does this have to do with PLC’s? Improving teaching methods is an

example of single-loop learning. Asking why the same kinds of students

continue to experience difficulty, despite improved teaching methods is an example of double-loop learning. This is about questioning the value of improving teaching methods.

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Creative Destruction

The need to obliterate the past to create the future.

This often results in endless swings of the pendulum, increased burnout, and an unnecessary waste of accumulated expertise and memory.

There is an alternative…

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Creative Recombination Sustainable improvement is about the

future and the past. It doesn’t treat people’s knowledge,

experience, and careers as disposable waste (think about resistance) but as valuable, renewable, and recombinable resources. While PLC’s should never blindly endorse the past, they should always respect and learn from it.

And so…

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The moment we begin to work with the past, not against it or in spite of it, is the moment we will see an end to repetitive change syndrome and the widespread resistance that results from it.

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So what do PLC’s do? The core mission of PLC’s is not simply to

ensure that students are taught, but that students learn.

Improving teaching methods (single-loop learning) is the meat and potatoes of PLC’s.

However, they continually monitor student learning at the school, classroom and individual level to ensure students are learning. If all students in all classes are not developing to their potential, PLC’s treat current classroom interactions as problematic (double-loop learning).

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The Time Factor Treating classroom interactions as

problematic takes a lot of time whereas learning new teaching methods can be done quickly.

Yes, but… Remember the fade and fizzle pattern

that is typical of a lot of educational reforms.

Going slower produces faster real change.

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How To Make PLC’s Fail… Create a sense of betrayal in teachers when

promised resources fail to materialize or abruptly disappear

Create a sense of frustration with shifting levels of endorsement or support from school leaders (hedging bets, backing off, caving in)

Encourage a sense of dismay over conflicts with colleagues and/or a failure of collegial support

Ignore the possibility of emotional and physical exhaustion associate with extra and unfamiliar responsibilities

Keep the definition of PLC’s broad enough to encourage disagreement over what they are

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