Professional learning community

A professional learning community (PLC) is a method to foster collaborative learning among colleagues within a particular work environment or field. It is often used in schools as a way to organize teachers into working groups of practice-based professional learning.If schools are to be significantly more effective, they must break from the industrial model upon which they were created and embrace a new model that enables them to function as learning organizations. We prefer characterizing learning organizations as 'professional learning communities' for several vital reasons. While the term 'organization' suggests a partnership enhanced by efficiency, expediency, and mutual interests, 'community' places greater emphasis on relationships, shared ideals, and a strong culture—all factors that are critical to school improvement. The challenge for educators is to create a community of commitment—a professional learning community. It sounds simple enough, but as the old adage warns, 'the devil is in the details.' Educators willing to embrace the concept of the school as a professional learning community will be given ambiguous, oftentimes conflicting advice on how they should proceed.The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared 'pictures of the future' that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counter-productiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt. A professional learning community (PLC) is a method to foster collaborative learning among colleagues within a particular work environment or field. It is often used in schools as a way to organize teachers into working groups of practice-based professional learning. The phrase professional learning community began to be used in the 1990s after Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline (1990) had popularized the idea of learning organizations,:2 related to the idea of reflective practice espoused by Donald Schön in books such as The Reflective Turn: Case Studies in and on Educational Practice (1991). Charles B. Myers and Lynn K. Myers used the phrase professional learning community in relation to schools in their 1995 book The Professional Educator: A New Introduction to Teaching and Schools, and a year later Charles B. Myers presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association titled 'Beyond the PDS: Schools as Professional Learning Communities' that proposed a path from professional development school (PDS) efforts to schools as professional learning communities. In 1997, Shirley M. Hord issued a white paper titled 'Professional Learning Communities: Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement'. A year later, Richard DuFour and Robert E. Eaker published the book Professional Learning Communities at Work. Since the late 1990s, a large literature on PLCs has been published. PLCs have many variations. In Shirley M. Hord's 1997 definition, it means 'extending classroom practice into the community; bringing community personnel into the school to enhance the curriculum and learning tasks for students; or engaging students, teachers, and administrators simultaneously in learning'.:1 Hord noted that the benefits of professional learning community to educators and students include reduced isolation of teachers, better informed and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. In 1998, Richard DuFour and Robert E. Eaker explained: In 2004, DuFour stated that initiating and sustaining a PLC 'requires the school staff to focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively on matters related to learning, and hold itself accountable for the kind of results that fuel continual improvement'.:11 In 2005, the Ontario Ministry of Education defined a PLC as 'a shared vision for running a school in which everyone can make a contribution, and staff are encouraged to collectively undertake activities and reflection in order to constantly improve their students' performance'.:53 Michael Fullan has noted that 'in the spread of PLCs, we have found that the term travels a lot faster than the concept, a finding common to all innovations. The concept is deep and requires careful and persistent attention in thorough learning by reflective doing and problem solving.' Fullan also noted: 'Transforming the culture of schools and the systems within which they operate is the main point. It is not an innovation to be implemented, but rather a new culture to be developed.' There are many core characteristics of PLCs including collective teamwork in which leadership and responsibility for student learning are extensively shared, a focus on reflective inquiry and dialogue among educators, collective emphasis on improving student learning, shared values and norms, and development of common practices and feedback. The 2005 report by the Ontario Ministry of Education titled Education for All indicates the characteristics of PLCs are as follows::54 Around the time that the term professional learning community was coined, a group of education researchers became interested in the similar idea of 'professional community' in schools. Based on data they collected in their research for the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools, Sharon Kruse, Karen Seashore Louis, and Anthony Bryk developed a three-part framework to describe the critical elements and supportive conditions that are necessary to establish a healthy 'professional' culture. The components of this framework are described in the following table. Kruse and colleagues found that 'in schools where professional community is strong, teachers work together more effectively, and put more efforts into creating and sustaining opportunities for student learning.' They also suggested that the social and human resources are more important than the structural conditions in the development of professional community. In their 2015 examination of middle school mathematics teachers' collaborative conversations regarding student data, Jason Brasel, Brette Garner, Britnie Kane and Ilana Horn found that the teachers used data to answer four questions: