Leadership in Learning Communities

Leadership in Learning Communities 

Members promote and participate in the creation of collaborative, safe and supportive learning communities. They recognize their shared responsibilities and their leadership roles in order to facilitate student success. Members maintain and uphold the principles of the ethical standards in these learning communities.

Professional Learning Community 

 Can be summed up in three words: improved student achievement. 

Although the term has grown to encompass a wide variety of concepts and practices, a professional learning community is always a group of people who are motivated by a vision of learning and who support one another toward that end.

 A PLC:

 • represents a collective effort to enhance student learning 

• promotes and sustains the learning of all professionals in the school

• builds knowledge through inquiry

• analyses and uses data for reflection and improvement

1. Ensuring Learning for All Students

A commitment to student learning must be at the centre of professional learning, decision-making, and action. When educators take ownership of this commitment, learning (not teaching) becomes the focal point, and a positive outcome results. Schools that demonstrate high levels of student improvement actively support the belief that “all children can succeed in school”. Ensuring all students learn becomes a matter of delivering fair and equitable instruction from classroom to classroom

2. Focus on Results

In order to focus on learning rather than teaching, student attainment of knowledge and skills must be consistently considered and reviewed. A reflective cycle must be initiated that is, a cycle in which “every teacher team participates in an ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement, establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress”

Focusing on results requires careful monitoring of all students where data is an integral part. It is only with the inclusion of data that the actions and activities of a professional learning community are focused on learning and improved student achievement.

Highly effective professional learning communities understand the critical importance of different types of assessment data. PLCs monitor student progress through the use of effective common assessments.

3. Relationships

The members of a professional learning community are involved in sharing with others, having their beliefs and practices open to questioning and inquiry, fostering cultures of challenge and focus, and encouraging feedback. These actions can only occur successfully in a community that is based on strong relationships.

When we share our practices and understandings, we become vulnerable to the judgments of others, which can place a strain on relationships. At times, this may involve conflict between differing viewpoints. With deep respect infused in a PLC, conflict can be dealt with through professional, open, and non-judgmental dialogue. This allows staff to view the process of building strong collective knowledge as a positive, necessary, and productive part of the school’s culture.

Relationships can be strengthened as trust levels are nurtured in a community.

4. Collaborative Inquiry

In order to ensure that professional learning is relevant to classroom practice, data from a variety of sources need to be analyzed to determine strengths and needs. Teachers are then able to identify areas for further inquiry – in small groups or as an entire staff. Once a focus of inquiry is determined, a professional learning strategy that will best facilitate learning should be considered.

Many strategies for professional learning can promote collaboration such as team teaching, teacher moderation and study groups.

There are benefits from these learning strategies as teachers share new skills, experiences, and knowledge gained.

5. Leadership

In any effective school, leaders are required to promote supportive environments, foster reflection, encourage risk taking, and challenge the status quo when it comes to student learning.

 Teachers are identified as “transformational leaders” as they are “in the best position to transform students’ lives, motivate and inspire students, and get students to do things they never thought they could do”.

6. Alignment

Alignment occurs when teachers from the same grade or division collaborate to promote high levels of learning in each classroom. Networks can then form – based on common needs and focus – to encompass various PLC groups and schools to further build capacity and alignment.

It is important for staff to accept the responsibility of the success of all students, not only the students in their class or grade.

Food for Thought

We need to bring people together. Whenever I'm in a group now, I ask people to listen for the differences. This is not how we normally listen. The way we normally listen is to listen long enough to find people who agree with us. The minute we realize that they don't agree, we shut off and we start correcting them in our head.

Source: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/PLC.pdf