Schools as Professional Learning Communities

Dr. Victoria Pettis

Summer Cohort 2006

EDUL 6017/ Jo Blasé, Ph.D.

July 21, 2006

EDUL 6017: School Staff Development (1 hour)

This course is designed to familiarize school leaders with the activities involved in designing a comprehensive staff development program in K-12 schools. The knowledge base, standards, and theory base of staff development are explored.

NOTE: NOTE: The assignment below is a short excerpt of a reflective paper I wrote, which I titled “Schools as Professional Learning Communities.”

Schools as Professional Learning Communities[1]

In the wake of No Child Left Behind regulations, the public has cast its critical spotlight on CRCT scores, graduation rates, achievements in math and reading, school report cards, and school-to-school AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) accountability. Educators across the nation have reacted by revamping their programs dealing with staff development, school reform, and improvement of schools – all attempts to increase student achievement.

As I read the material for this course, my mind kept having flashbacks to my own professional development. In the past 18 years, I have taken staff development courses that have covered a myriad of topics, from meeting the needs of a culturally diverse classroom in the early 1990s to the current topic of implementing the Georgia Performance Standards. My readings enabled me to recognize that I have had two opportunities to see schools endeavoring to increase student achievement through the implementation of learning communities. This critical insight had such an impact that I decided that a description of these experiences will serve as a backdrop for this paper. Encased in these stories, readers will find the connections and applications I have made as I have learned about the process of professional development in this course, a critique of my school’s professional development program, other critical insights I have gained, and questions that remain for my future exploration.

Learning about Professional Development

During the first four years that I taught at Podunk High School, the high school dropout rate for freshmen was a source of frustration for all of us on the faculty. Each year, the freshmen class would start with over 500 eager students. Barely half that number would graduate four years later. Once students hit the legal age of 16 during their freshmen year, they opted to drop out. The issue constantly made headlines in the local newspaper.

In an attempt to empower ninth graders to stay in school and successfully move to the next grade, Podunk High administrators announced to us during a faculty meeting that they had won a federally funded educational grant to establish smaller learning communities among the freshmen class, which they aptly called “Freshman Academies.” My colleagues, who volunteered to take part of this venture, had gone through a great deal of summer staff development on smaller learning communities. As the Freshmen Academies were implemented during the year, I noticed ninth graders were no longer held to the same expectations or standards as the other students. Instead of traversing the 1,500-student campus for their classes; students were taught by two teams of teachers, whose classrooms were housed together on the same hallway. These teaching teams were responsible for providing their students with all four of their core classes – math, English, history, and science. Plus, they served as advisors and mentors to these students during their first year at PHS. Students only had to go off the hallway for their two elective classes.

As Roberts and Pruitt (2003) suggest, building learning communities require a complete shift in our thinking of schools as large bureaucratic organizations to a vision of schools as communities. The PHS academy teachers worked on teams where they had common planning time, which allowed them to work collaboratively to plan interdisciplinary units as well as community-building activities and celebrations. It was as if the Freshmen Academies operated as a separate school within PHS. The teachers could no longer teach in isolation like the rest of the faculty. Several of my colleagues commented that their collaboration enabled them to have “never before” collegial conversations about their students. These conversations led to them gaining new insights about students, their behavior, and how they best learned.

My biggest criticism of the Freshmen Academies was that by the end of the second year of its implementation, the faculty was never told whether the concept of smaller learning communities had any impact on the goals of maintaining freshmen and increasing their achievement.[2] In addition, I do not know what benefits, if any, the learning communities had on the teachers’ professional development. Since they had common planning time, they could not visit one another’s classrooms. Colleagues never mentioned to me about how teaching on the academy transformed their teaching.

REFERENCES

Easker, R., DuFour, R., & DuFour, R. (2002). Getting started: Reculturating schools to become professional learning communities. Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service.

Murphy, C.U., & Lick, D.W. (2005). Whole faculty study groups: Creating professional learning communities that target learning (3^rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Roberts, S.M., & Pruitt, E.Z. (2003). Schools as professional learning communities: Collaborative activities and strategies for professional development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

[1] Pseudonyms will be used in this report when referring to names of actual people, schools, and school districts.

[2] We were constantly inundated with reports about the activities of Freshmen Academies, but no data was ever made available public about whether the Freshmen Academies increased the success of freshmen.