Creating Professional Learning Communities: The Work of Professional Development Schools (Doolittle, et al. 2008)

KEY IDEAS

Challenges for teachers:  responding to bureaucratic mandates; responsible for multiple sets of teaching and learning standards; clear delineation of constitution of best practices; lack of adequate common planning time;  tendency for isolating and comnpartmenalized structure; effective teaching strategies seldom shared, and finally teaching techniques needing modification (or elimination) are rarely identified.   

Learning community members grow toward: having a sense of common purpose; peers viewed as colleagues; self/group actualization sought; perception of outside groups similar to one's own; professional reflection; giving and seeking help; celebrating accomplishments.

Teachers act as educational leaders rather than classroom managers.  Focusing on mutually agreed upon educational initiatives and using a systemic change model, real work can be accomplished and sustained.

"Critical friends" colleagues who come along side, not as adversaries or critics rather beneficial observers who can offer benevolent advice on specific pedagological practices.

Being aware that unpleasant emotional loss of "foundational teaching practices," and uneasy zones of uncertainty must be worked through for forward movement in a systematic way.

Real change requires time for implementation and evaluation of new techniques and practices before positive effects on student achievement and the increase of faculty community.

YOUR COMMENTS OF REACTION: implementation/application/rejection?

Professional Learning What?

When faculty maintain a sharp-focus on student achievement and how to get students to cooperate for their learning, maintain a spirit of common ownership & responsibility for that achievement; their students will achieve success (Nathan, 2008).  Simply described a professional learning community is a "group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, and learning-focused way, and then operating as a collective entity" (Peskin, Katz, & Lazare, 2009). 

Thankfully the days of newbies having to make it on their own, the isolation they felt no longer has to encompass them.  The operational professional learning community is for all students, as well as for new or well-seasoned faculty.  Students and faculty, and faculty with faculty all focused on the successful learning of all parties; a PLC is born!

That's What I'm Talking About!

Those flashes of sudden understanding makes all the 50-gallizion times you explained something, demonstrated it, illustrated it, had the students draw it:  worth the one light bulb flash from at least one student!  Information transfer--we have to do all we can to get it to them, so they can begin constructing their networks of knowledge.