Professional Learning

SQIC COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
CHECKLIST OF DESIRED ATTRIBUTES

1. Professional Learning Communities1 share at least the following conceptual components: shared mission, vision, values and goals; collaborative teams; collective inquiry; action orientation and experimentation; continuous improvement; and results orientation. Schools that are professional learning communities (PLC?s) differ in many respects but they share: clarity of purpose; collaborative culture; collective inquiry into best practice and current reality; action orientation; commitment to continuous improvement; focus on results; strong principals who empower teachers; commitment to face adversity, conflict, and anxiety; and the same guiding phrase ? ?Whatever it takes!?

Their fundamental purpose is learning, not teaching, and they concentrate their effort and energy on three critical questions:

  • Exactly what is it we want all students to learn?

  • How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?

  • What happens in each school when a student does not learn, to ensure that the moral and practical imperative, that ?All students can and will learn? is in fact achieved?

Cultural shifts for developing the culture of a PLC2 include the shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning; from working is isolation to working collaboratively; from focusing on activities to focusing on results; from fixed time to flexible time; from average learning to individual learning; from punitive to positive; from ?teacher tell/student listen? to ?teacher coaching/student practice?; and from recognizing the elite to creating opportunity for many winners.

The PLC continuum:

  • Overall PLC development;

  • Mission: is it evident that learning for all is our core purpose?

  • Shared Vision: do we know what we are trying to create?

  • Shared Values: how must we behave to advance our vision?

  • Goals: what are our priorities?

  • Collaborative Culture: teachers working together

  • Collaborative Culture: administrator/teacher relations

  • Parent partnerships

  • Action research

  • Continuous improvement3

  • Focus on Results

2. Our Communities of Practice will also build upon best practices in character development. A study that was recently reported in the New York Times Magazine provides some insight on the reasons for the effectiveness of chartered public schools.4 Many of DC?s chartered public schools already specialize in character education, socialization and re-socialization practices.

3. Specific recommendations from our QEAP have been included in the notes from our meeting with them.

1 In the sustaining stage of this element, ?Everyone in the school participates in an ongoing cycle of systematic gathering and analysis of data to identify discrepancies between actual and desired results, goal setting to reduce the discrepancies, developing strategies to achieve the goals, and tracking improvement indicators
2 The schools that are achieving the most impressive results with poor and minority students tend to follow three practices. First, they require many more hours of class time than a typical public school. Second, they treat classroom instruction and lesson planning as much as a science as an art. Explicit goals are set for each year, month and day of each class, and principals have considerable authority to redirect and even remove teachers who aren?t meeting those goals. Third, they make a conscious effort to guide the behavior, and even the values, of their students by teaching what they call character. The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. Source
3 Please see Whatever It Takes How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don?t Learn by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Gayle Karhanek (Solution Tree [formerly National Educational Service], Bloomington, Indiana, 2004, www.solution-tree.com.)
4 The concept of PLC?s grows out of the work of Peter M. Senge in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization. ?Most of us at one time or another have been part of a great ?team,? a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way ? who trusted one another, who complemented each others? strengths and compensated for each other?s limitations, who had common goals that were larger than individual goals, and who produced extraordinary results. I have met many people who have experienced this sort of profound teamwork ? in sports, or in the performing arts, or in business. Many say that they have spent much of their life looking for that experience again. What they experienced was a learning organization. The team that became great didn?t start off great ? it learned how to produce extraordinary results.?

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