What is our fundamental purpose?
2. What do we hope to achieve?
3. What are our strategies for becoming better?
4. What criteria will we use to assess our improvement efforts?
A commitment to continuous improvement is evident in an environment in which innovation and experimentation are viewed not as tasks to accomplish or projects to complete, but as ways of conducting day-to-day business, forever. Members of a professional learning community recognize and celebrate the fact that mission and vision are ideals that will never be fully realized, but must always be worked toward. In short, becoming a learning community is less like getting in shape than staying in shape—it is not a fad diet, but a never-ending commitment to an essential, vital way of life.
6. Results orientation. Finally, a professional learning community realizes that its efforts to develop shared mission, vision, and values; engage in collective inquiry; build collaborative teams; take action; and focus on continuous improvement must be assessed on the basis of results rather than intentions. Unless initiatives are subject to ongoing assessment on the basis of tangible results, they represent random groping in the dark rather than purposeful improvement. Peter Senge (1996) notes that “the rationale for any strategy for building a learning organization revolves around the premise that such organizations will produce dramatically improved results” (p. 44).
The School as a Professional Learning Community: A Scenario
How would these characteristics of learning communities affect daily operation of a school? Consider the following scenario, which illustrates the professional learning community at work:
Connie Donovan approached her first teaching assignment with all the anxiety and nervous trepidation of any first-year teacher. She had been assured during her interview that her new school operated as a learning community that valued teacher collaboration. Nevertheless, the memory of her roommate’s introduction to the teaching profession the year before was still fresh in her mind. Poor Beth had been assigned to teach one of the most difficult remedial courses in her school—classes filled with students who had failed the course in the past due to a variety of problems. Her orientation had consisted of a review of the employee manual and an overview of the teacher’s contract by the principal on the morning of the day before students were to arrive. Then she was given the key to her room, the teacher’s edition of the textbook, and her class roster. The following day, she faced her 135 students for the first time. Her nine weeks of training as a student teacher had not prepared her for the difficulties she encountered, and there was no support system to help her. She did not know how to respond to student misbehavior and apathy, and she had told Connie tearfully that she felt she was losing control of her class. Connie had watched Beth work far into the night, preparing lessons and grading papers, but each week Beth only seemed to become more discouraged and overwhelmed. Weekends offered no respite. Beth’s teaching position had been contingent upon her willingness to serve as cheerleading sponsor, and Friday nights and Saturdays were spent supervising cheerleaders. By March, she had decided that she was not cut out for teaching. She dreaded each day and frequently called in sick. By the end of the year, she had admitted to Connie that she felt like she was hanging on by her fingernails.
Knowing this story as she did, Connie was relieved to get a phone call that summer from Jim, a veteran member of the faculty of her new school. Jim had participated on the committee that had interviewed her for the position. He congratulated her on her appointment to the social studies department, explained that he would be serving as her mentor during her first year, and invited her to lunch to make introductions and answer any questions she might have. Her anxiety diminished somewhat when Jim told her that the school provided two full days of orientation and another three days for the faculty to work together before students arrived.
The new teacher orientation was nothing like what Beth had described. After introductions, the principal spent the morning explaining the history of the school. She carefully reviewed the school’s vision statement, pointing out that it had been jointly developed by the faculty, administration, community members, and students. She explained that the statement described what the school was striving to become, and she highlighted recent initiatives that the school had begun in its effort to move closer to the ideal described in the vision. She then divided all the new teachers into small groups and asked them to identify any points of the vision statement that they felt needed clarification. The emphasis the principal gave to the vision statement made it clear to Connie that it was a major focus for the school.
Connie spent the afternoon with her department chairman and Jim. Together they provided Connie with an overview of the entire scope and sequence of the social studies department’s curriculum. They also provided her with course descriptions that teachers had developed for each course, and they reviewed the essential outcomes all students were expected to achieve in the courses she was teaching. They explained further that these outcomes had been determined collectively by the teachers after considerable discussion and a lengthy review of the state’s goals in social studies, the report on student achievement in social studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the curriculum standards recommended by the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Center for History in the Schools. Finally, they reviewed the vision statement for the department that the teachers themselves had developed. They discussed the department’s improvement goals and priorities and demonstrated to Connie how she might use the department’s common files in her own planning and assessment activities.
On the second day of orientation, the principal introduced the president of the teachers’ association, who distributed and explained the faculty value statements. These statements had been developed by the faculty to give direction to the daily work of teachers. The association president pointed out the link between the value statements and the school’s vision and explained that every group in the school—the Board of Education, administration, support staff, students, and parents—had articulated similar statements of the commitments they were prepared to make to improve the school.
The rest of the morning was spent hearing from representatives of the different support services available to teachers—the deans, the director of the media center, the technology coordinator, the pupil personnel department, the special education department, and the tutors from the resource centers. Each speaker emphasized that his or her function was to help teachers. That afternoon, Connie’s mentor helped her set up her classroom, asked what she hoped to accomplish on the first day and during the first week of class, and offered a few suggestions based on her response.
When the entire faculty arrived the next day, Connie was surprised to see that the morning was devoted to a celebration of the start of the school year. At the opening meeting, the principal announced milestones—weddings, births, engagements, advanced degrees, and other important events that faculty members had experienced over the summer. Each announcement was met with warm applause by the faculty. The principal then stressed several themes from the vision statement and reminded teachers of the priorities they had established for that school year. Each new faculty member was introduced to the group by his or her mentor and then given a faculty T-shirt. The rest of the morning was spent enjoying a festive, schoolwide brunch, complete with skits and entertainment presented by members of the faculty and administration. Connie was surprised and pleased to learn that this back-to-school celebration was an annual tradition planned and orchestrated by a faculty committee.
That afternoon, the teachers split into teaching teams to discuss how the team would handle its responsibilities. Every teacher in the school had been appointed as a member of one or more teaching teams. Connie was a member of an interdisciplinary team that included an English teacher and a science teacher. Together the three of them would be responsible for 75 students. These students were assigned to Connie and her two colleagues for a three-hour block every day and would remain with the same
