Creating Schools as the Centers of Inquiry: Building
Professional Learning Communities
Submitted by:
Kathleen Fleming
EDCI
6303
Abstract
The term learning
community is becoming well integrated into the vocabulary of
educators in America. This paper focuses on how learning communities
can be introduced and developed in schools by bringing professionals
together to learn. Comprehensive school reform requires new content,
new skills and new thinking. Therefore, everyone involved in the
reform must be regarded as a learner. As new learning environments
are developed, communities of continuous inquiry and improvement are
the result.
Community is the shared life of human beings. It means more
than mere association. By virtue of their immediate interaction
with one another, human beings are necessarily associated. But
community means meaningful association, association based on common
interest and endeavor. The essence of community is communication,
the sharing of meanings through common symbols or language.
Communication is the means of individual as well as social growth.
(John Dewey)
Creating Schools as the Centers
of Inquiry: Building Professional Learning Communities
'There is growing evidence that the best hope for significant school
improvement is transforming schools into professional learning
communities' (Dufour & Eaker, 1998). This paper will focus on
what Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker have labeled the professional
community of learners. This is a term that is quite vogue at the
moment and is being used to describe many areas in the educational
reform field: grade-level teaching teams, school committees, school
district sight-based teams, etc.
However, programs and materials do not bring about change, people
do. So, for the purpose of this paper, a professional learning
community will be defined as one in which the teachers and
administrators in a school continuously seek and share learning and
then act upon this information to implement school change. This
document will explore the concept of how learning communities can be
introduced and nurtured in schools through professional development.
Schools that are characterized as true learning
organizations possess a culture that is truly communicative and
collaborative. Driven by a mutual accountability for ensuring
student success, each individual in the school community not only
takes responsibility for but contributes to everyone's learning. To
establish a professional learning community, school staff must begin
by engaging in learning together. Research has shown that when
administrators and teachers become learners together through
professional development activities, 'questioning, investigating and
seeking solutions,' a new kind of relationship is forged-learning
leaders (Newmann & Wehlage, 1995).
One of ten regional educational research and development
laboratories in the United States, the Southwest Educational
Development Laboratory (SEDL) has designed a project called Creating
Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement which targets the
creation of professional learning communities in schools. This study
indicates that organizations improve when their members are learning
consistently and effectively (SEDL, 1997). The SEDL describes a
professional learning community as schools 'characterized by shared
purpose, collaborative learning activities, and collaborative
responsibility among staff'. When teachers feel they are supported
in ongoing learning activities, working together as learning teams,
they are more committed and effective than those who do not receive
this affirmation. By providing shared learning opportunities for
teachers to train together, collaborate together, and expand their
roles as professionals, the impetus towards a campus professional
learning community begins. Teachers who have this sense of their own
efficacy are more likely to stay in the profession and contribute to
a school's shared vision.
Focusing on people is the most important way to change any
organization. Michael Fullan (1993) says that it is only when enough
people within an organization change that the organization can be
transformed. The Flour Bluff Early Childhood Center had always been
a good school, filled with professional educators, and children who
were learning. But the question is what were they learning? Teachers
were teaching, but teaching in isolation, islands onto themselves.
As administrators new to this campus, the principal and I felt that
a really successful school must go beyond this, that a good school
must also focus on a collaborative community, building relationships
that cared. This community building was approached in a commonsense
manner, collaboration, conversation on creating changes in the area
of reading to better support the school district's Literacy
Initiative. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge writes 'It
is becoming clear that schools can be re-created, made vital, and
sustainably renewed not by fiat or command, and not by regulation,
but by taking a learning orientation' (Senge, 1990). At the Early
Childhood Center, by developing a shared vision and a shift to the
focus on student learning rather that student teaching, we were able
to make learning our orientation, with improvement in the teaching
of reading a priority. We developed a professional culture that is
continuing to promote learning improvement.
Our Reading Collaborative literacy training has enabled us to begin
the crafting of the critical conversations necessary in community
building. As a direct result of this training and the ensuing
'critical conversations', teacher isolation has been reduced and
school morale has increased. Those critical conversations have
transformed our school by creating a school climate that values
communication and reflection, envisioning the future. This discourse
has allowed a mutually respectful community to blossom where
teachers share instructional decisions in a democratic setting. ECC
teachers are constantly seeking information and sharing their
expertise with their colleagues. Our campus literacy training has
resulted in the development of teacher learning leaders. These
learning teams model pedagogy, plan and implement workshops, make
budgetary decisions, analyze instructional activities, and help
reflect on our schools instructional practices. Peer coaching has
also become a valued component of our campus culture. There has been
a huge jump in commitment to the vision and goals of the school and
our teachers now feel a shared responsibility for student success.
Today, this campus is a caring community of teachers, whose
discourse and work are helping to restructure this campus. In a
larger sense, by working to understand each other in the pursuit of
knowledge and community, the teachers are helping to establish a
campus where caring collaboration is the norm. This is a school
where everyone feels they belong.
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