Professional Learning Communities Focus on Learning for All Students

To create a professional learning community, educators need to focus on learning more than on teaching, on working collaboratively, and on holding themselves accountable for results.

Big Idea #1: Ensuring That Students Learn

The core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn. This simple shift—from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning—has profound implications for schools.

Every education professional in a building must engage with colleagues in the ongoing exploration of three crucial questions: What do we want each student to learn? How will we know when each student has learned? How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

The answer to this last question is especially critical. When a school begins to function as a professional learning community, teachers become aware of the need for a coordinated strategy to respond when some students struggle to learn. Staff then work together to ensure that struggling students receive additional time and support, no matter who their teacher is. In addition to being systematic and schoolwide, the professional learning community’s response to students who experience difficulty is timely, based on intervention rather than remediation, and directive.

Big Idea #2: A Culture of Collaboration

The powerful collaboration that characterizes professional learning communities is a systematic process in which teachers work together to analyze and improve their classroom practice. Teachers work in teams, engaging in an ongoing cycle of questions that promote deep-team learning. This process, in turn, leads to higher levels of student achievement.

For teachers to participate in such a powerful process, the school must ensure that everyone belongs to a team that focuses on student learning. Each team must have time to meet during the workday and throughout the school year. Teams must focus their efforts on crucial questions related to learning and generate products that reflect that focus. Examples include lists of essential outcomes, ideas for different kinds of assessment, analysis of student achievement, and strategies for improving results. Teams must develop norms or protocols to clarify expectations regarding roles, responsibilities, and relationships among team members. They also must create student achievement goals consistent with school and district goals.

Teacher conversations must quickly move beyond “What are we expected to teach?” to “How will we know when each student has learned?” Building the collaboration culture of a professional learning community is a question of will. Staff members who are determined to work together will find a way.

Big Idea #3: A Focus on Results

Schools and teachers typically suffer from the “DRIP syndrome”—Data Rich/Information Poor. When teacher teams develop common formative assessments throughout the school year, each teacher can identify how his or her students performed on each skill compared with other students. Individual teachers can call on their colleagues to help them reflect on areas of concern. In a professional learning community, each teacher has access to the ideas, materials, strategies, and talents of the entire team.

Conclusion

The most important element in any school improvement plan is, of course, the commitment and persistence of the educators involved. When educators do the hard work necessary to implement the principles of a professional learning community, they will improve their ability to help all students learn.

Richard DuFour is an author and former superintendent at Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. He currently resides in Moneta, Virginia. For more information, contact: rdufour@district125.k12.il.us.

Source: Adapted with permission from the May 2004, Volume 61, Number 8 edition of Educational Leadership, a publication of www.teacherleaders.org.

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