outside of education. Over a decade of research has established that the most successful people in any area look outside their narrow field for fresh perspectives and new ideas (Kanter, 1997). We believe that school practitioners can and should learn from the organizations outside of education that have struggled with some of the same issues that public schools face today. The best of these organizations have struggled to find answers to the following questions:
• How can we clarify and communicate the purpose, vision, and values of our organization?
• How can we initiate, implement, and sustain a change process?
• How can we provide strong leadership at the same time that we empower those closest to the action?
• How can we shape organizational culture and provide structures that support the culture we seek?
• How can we create collaborative processes that result in both individual and organizational learning?
• How can we foster an environment that is results-oriented yet encourages experimentation?
This book attempts to summarize the important lessons successful organizations have learned as they have struggled to answer these questions. Thus, the book merges educational research with research from areas outside of education.
The book also represents a merger of another kind—a merger of theory and practice. Too often, researchers and practitioners have different interests, speak different languages, and live in different worlds. This book attempts to bridge the chasm between theory and practice through the collaboration of its authors—the dean of a college of education whose background is in research and the superintendent of a nationally recognized school district. We have reviewed the research, but we have also worked in school districts in 40 states. We have observed and struggled with the perplexities of school improvement. Our experiences have given us insights into the practices that enable a school to function as a professional learning community and have helped us identify the obstacles a school must overcome in the pursuit of that goal.
Chapter Overviews
“Life,” Kierkegaard said, “must be lived forward, but it can be understood only backward.” While this book strives to describe a better future for public schools, it begins with a look backward. Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of educational reform efforts during the second half of the twentieth century with an emphasis on the Excellence Movement of the 1980s and the Restructuring Movement of the 1990s. It describes the reactions of despair and defiance that accompanied the failure of these movements to fulfill their promises of significant improvement in public education. It suggests the reasons for the failure and presents the assertion that the best hope for significant school improvement lies in transforming schools into professional learning communities.
Chapter 2 contrasts the factory model that has characterized the traditional school environment with the model of a professional learning community. It presents examples of the consistent research findings that have concluded that creating professional learning communities represents the best hope for sustained school improvement, and it specifies the characteristics of such communities. The chapter concludes with a scenario that describes one professional learning community at work.
Chapter 3 examines the complexity of the change process and the often confusing and contradictory advice that research on the change process seems to offer. It urges a realistic acceptance of the difficulty and complexity of substantive change and identifies common mistakes that are made when any organization attempts significant reform. It examines the assertion that a sense of urgency is a prerequisite for change and considers the possibilities for creating a sense of urgency in public schools.
Chapter 4 begins the examination of the four building blocks of a professional learning community—mission, vision, values, and goals. Each building block asks a question of the people in the school. When educators work together to answer these questions, they establish the foundation of a learning community. The mission building block probes the question, “What is our purpose?” to which schools often provide a trite and superficial response. Chapter 4 suggests how the issue can be examined in a way that serves as a catalyst for improvement. This chapter also examines the vision building block, which asks the question, “What do we hope to become?” It offers strategies for developing a shared vision, examines common questions related to articulating a vision, provides summaries of research that can be used to inform the process, and suggests criteria for assessing a vision statement.
Chapter 5 examines the third and fourth building blocks of a professional learning community—values and goals. The values block poses the question, “How must we behave in order to make our shared vision a reality?” Value statements articulate the attitudes, behaviors, and commitments that each group is prepared to demonstrate to advance toward the shared vision. The chapter offers examples of value statements for different groups in the school and suggestions for developing such statements. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to the goals building block, which clarifies the nature and timetable of the specific steps that will be taken in the initiative to move the school toward its vision. Goals help move the improvement effort from rhetoric to action and can provide the intermittent successes critical to sustaining the improvement process. The chapter identifies common mistakes that schools make in developing goals and presents criteria for assessing goals.
Chapter 6 emphasizes the importance of sustaining an improvement initiative through communication, and it offers a series of questions that can be used to audit the effectiveness with which educators communicate what is important in their schools. The chapter also makes a strong case for job-embedded collaborative structures as a sine qua non of a professional learning community. It suggests different structures that can be used and outlines the prerequisites for effective collaborative teams.
Chapter 7 discusses the importance of embedding a change initiative in the culture of a school—the assumptions, beliefs, values, and habits that constitute the norms for the school and that shape how its people think, feel, and act. It stresses the idea that inattention to culture has been a major flaw in past efforts to reform schools, and it suggests several strategies for shaping culture through the articulation of shared values, creation of structures that facilitate reflective dialogue, communication of symbolic stories, and attention to celebration. The chapter concludes with an examination of the interrelationship between the culture of a school and the policies, procedures, rules, and relationships that constitute its structure.
Chapter 8 discusses how the professional learning community addresses the critical issue of curriculum and argues for giving teachers a greater voice in curricular decisions. The chapter describes a process in which teachers work collaboratively to design a research-based curriculum that reflects the best thinking in each subject area and clarifies the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that each student is to acquire. It calls for a reduction of content so that all parties can focus on essential learning and for assessment procedures that give teachers relevant information that can guide their instructional decisions. The attention to this cycle of clarifying what students need to know and be able to do, monitoring student achievement, analyzing results, and making adjustments to instruction based on the actual versus the desired results is the prime example of the commitment
