What Makes a Professional Learning Community Effective?
Shirley Hord of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory has traced the origin of the teacher professional learning community (PLC) concept to a groundbreaking book in the literature of management theory:
In 1990, Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline arrived in bookstores and began popping up in the boardrooms of corporate America. Over the next year or so, the book and its description of learning organizations, which might serve to increase organizational capacity and creativity, moved into the educational environment. The idea of a learning organization "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together" (p. 3) caught the attention of educators who were struggling to plan and implement reform in the nation's schools. As Senge's paradigm shift was explored by educators and shared in educational journals, the label became learning communities. (S. Hord [1997]. Professional learning communities: What are they and why are they important? Issues…About Change, 6(1), http://www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues61.html#summary)
Marilyn Carlson’s Project Pathways research team has been developing and studying a particular variant of the teacher professional learning community (PLC) concept. In the project, all teachers take a sequence of CRESMET courses together or they teach the same courses, usually in the same school. The goal is to develop PLCs that focus on the content teachers teach. Members discuss that content, develop lessons, observe one another’s teaching and work as a supportive community to help one another improve. CRESMET faculty and staff have developed workshops to train selected teachers to serve as PLC facilitators, with an eye to keeping the communities alive long after this project ends.
The team is developing observation tools that will allow researchers and professional development staff to assist the communities. A Facilitator Observation Protocol (FOP)© is in early development. A Learning Community Observation Protocol (LCOP)© is due for pilot testing this spring.
A first step in building the LCOP has been to analyze several years worth of data from the project’s PLCs to identify the features that propel or impede the groups. Below is a breakdown of the features the researchers have identified to date.
Sample LCOP© Items
N.B. This excerpt is taken from unpublished manuscripts of Marilyn Carlson. Reproduction is prohibited. All rights reserved.
Potential Scale: Items I-VI below are rated on a scale from 0-4 as follows
0: Unproductive Community Norms. Unproductive characteristics of the category are explicitly expected, encouraged or rewarded. Productive characteristics are (consistently?) discouraged or punished.
1: Unproductive Activity. Predominantly unproductive characteristics are observed.
2: Neutral. Both productive and unproductive characteristics are observed, or primarily productive behaviors are observed, but examples are weak.
3: Productive Activity. Predominantly productive characteristics are observed.
4: Productive Community Norms. Productive characteristics of the category are explicitly expected, encouraged or rewarded. Unproductive characteristics are (consistently?) discouraged or punished.
Note: This scaling method has yet to be tested, and other possibilities should still be considered. If this approach proves to be viable, its advantages are that it uses a consistent approach across all categories (making coding easier) and including the normative aspect focuses the evaluation on the community.
Part I—Dispositional Behaviors of the Group
- The group has a conceptual (rather than a procedural) approach to their activity.
Productive Characteristics:
- Discussions about student learning focus primarily on helping students understand the meaning of a concept or idea.
- Discussions about class content focus on meaning.
- Primary communication focuses on the meanings of quantities (and their units) and meanings of the operations performed on them.
- Statements are “unpacked” to reveal the structure of their constituent parts
- Mathematics (and abstract ideas in general) are regularly framed in terms of concrete contexts (Note that what is “concrete” or “meaningful” is group-dependent, so how do we account for that in making decisions?)
- Complex terminology is clarified.
Unproductive Characteristics:
- Discussions about student learning plans focus primarily on teaching students how to carry out procedures.
- Discussions about class content focus on how to do the homework.
- Primary communication focuses on the numbers, computations, and procedures, without connection to their meanings.
- Jargon or idiosyncratic language is often used without clarification of meaning.
- Pronouns with ambiguous antecedents are frequently used.
- The group exhibits intellectual integrity.
Productive Characteristics:
- Members provide rationale for their thinking.
- Group requires justification from others when they don’t provide it.
- Group seeks consistency in statements made by in the community.
- Members are honest about what they understand or don’t understand
- Individuals subject the validity of their own reasoning to scrutiny.
Unproductive Characteristics:
- Members offer the first thing that comes to mind without reflecting about how it relates to the situation.
- Inconsistencies in statements are glossed over.
- Members avoid putting their thinking on the table.
- Members often defer to the authority of the facilitator or perceived experts in the group.
- Members avoid confronting each other on incorrect or inconsistent statements.
The group seeks a coherent and connected understanding.
Productive Characteristics:
- Multiple representations and various ways of thinking are expressed.
- The main point of group discussion is clear.
- The discourse in the group builds by comparing and extending ideas that have been presented.
- Discussions about the class content relate the ideas to other concepts.
- Ideas are fully developed and their implications are explored.
- Connections between concepts are sought and used
- Once an idea is explored, the group returns to consider subtleties, exceptions, alternative explanations, etc.
- When planning lessons, the group considers how the lesson will help students build a coherent understanding.
- The meanings of particular discussions are framed in terms of a bigger picture of the content area or student learning.
Unproductive Characteristics:
- Members are satisfied with their solutions as long as the answer is right.
- Members pursue a line of reasoning despite evidence to the contrary.
- Members fixate on certain ideas and aren’t open to other solutions.
- Concepts are treated as isolated and unrelated.
- When planning a lesson, the activities seem isolated and unrelated.
- Discussion moves from topic to topic without closure or interconnections.
Part II—The Process Behaviors of the Group
- The group members are productively engaged throughout the session.
Productive Characteristics:
- The group is engaged in a reflective rather than routine way.
- Most members are contributing to the discussion in meaningful ways.
- Most members actively contribute to the decisions about the direction of the discourse and to its progression.
- The group encourages less active members to participate.
Unproductive Characteristics:
- The group works routinely through the agenda without real engagement with the material.
- Some members are not engaged in the intended activity of the group.
- Some members are engaged, but they exclude other members.
- The group spends a lot of time on extraneous discussion.
- The group does not seem to value the time spent in the learning community.
5. The community employs appropriate and powerful conceptual resources
Productive Characteristics:
- Appropriate content-based concepts or tools are chosen and applied as needed
- Members invoke analogous situations or metaphor effectively when appropriate.
- When planning lessons, it is clear that the group has or works to develop a deep understanding of the content to be taught.
- The group seeks outside resources when they recognize a gap in their collective understanding of a topic.
- Decisions and actions are based on appropriate understandings of how specific concepts are learned.
Unproductive Characteristics:
- The group chooses inappropriate content-based tools or is not able to properly apply appropriate tools when needed
- Irrelevant or incorrect statements are regularly offered without recognition or evaluation of their appropriateness.
- The group does not seem to have the knowledge or experience to enable meaningful discussion of some of the topics that come up.
- The group does not draw on conceptual resources when the opportunities arise.
6. The group persists through difficulties and evaluates the effectiveness of their activity.
Productive Characteristics:
- The members try to assess whether they have made their points clear to the group.
- The group tries to make sense of the problem at hand (ideas from class, solutions to problems, ideas for lesson plans, etc.)
- The group will continue working through a problem until closure is made or actions are assigned.
- The members try to evaluate their solutions to problems by checking for validity and comparing with other solutions.
- The group evaluates the effectiveness of the concepts and tools that they apply.
Unproductive Characteristics:
- Suggestions and ideas are given, but are not critically evaluated.
- Some group members are satisfied taking others’ solutions without really understanding the ideas.
- The group quickly gives up when they are not successful
- One member gives answers to the group before others have had time to think through the problems.