Abstract
In this chapter, I present a sobering assessment of the challenges facing the PLC movement. We are beginning to see that enthusiastic efforts to “scale up” PLCs often backfire. Rather than assessing student performance and collaborating to improve teaching and learning, many teacher groups formed through mandates simply comply with the letter of the law and fail to realize improved student achievement. This is because school administrators and leaders of change either fail to understand the deep principles that anchor PLC work or try to create them in ways that alienate teachers. I conclude the chapter by suggesting six principles for changing a school system in ways that will stimulate and sustain PLCs as described in the literature.
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- 1.
The Stanford University Center for Research on the Context of Teaching (CRC) has documented the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative’s work with several districts (2001–2006), the University of California Santa Cruz New Teacher Center’s work with Ravenswood City School District (2005–ongoing); the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Learning’s work with the Austin Independent School District (2006–ongoing), the New Visions for Public Schools and Baruch College partnership work with schools in several regions of NYC (2006–ongoing). Collaborators on these projects include Jane David of the Bay Area Research Group (Ravenswood and Austin project), Amy Gerstein of Gerstein and Associates (Ravenswood project), and Nell Scharff of Baruch College (the NYC project). We also draw on 3 years of research in a midwestern district involved in a national “learning system” initiative, on which Cynthia Coburn of University of California at Berkeley collaborated, and on case studies of Long Beach Unified School District written by a researchers in Harvard University’s Public Education Leadership Program (Austin, Grossman, Schwartz, & Suesse, 2006a, 2006b; Honan, Schwartz, & Seusse, 2004).
- 2.
Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999). In the NRC report’s language, effective learning environments are community-centered, content-centered, learner-centered, and assessment-centered.
- 3.
In a 100-school district we studied, statistical analysis showed a strong positive effect of mean teacher experience on teacher community strength (.40), with student poverty level controlled; student poverty was correlated (–.66) with teacher experience.
- 4.
In his classic study Schoolteacher, Dan Lortie (1960) portrayed the growth of education bureaucracies as a threat to teacher professionalism. A long tradition of sociological theory treats bureaucratic authority and professional authority as fundamentally opposed modes of organizing work, with work controlled through hierarchy, rules, and organization sanctions in the former and through professional expertise, standards, and mutual accountability in the latter.
- 5.
See Kruse and Louis (2007), on this distinction and for further evidence that centralized strategies can support PLCs.
- 6.
These are the conditions of effective learning environments identified by the National Research Council panel on learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999)
- 7.
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Talbert, J.E. (2010). Professional Learning Communities at the Crossroads: How Systems Hinder or Engender Change. In: Hargreaves, A., Lieberman, A., Fullan, M., Hopkins, D. (eds) Second International Handbook of Educational Change. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2660-6_32
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