For Giselle Martin-Kniep, establishing a professional learning community (PLC) is as much an organizational lifestyle change as it is a forum through which teachers can hone their instruction. PLCs should have a permanent role in school improvement efforts, Martin-Kniep states. Supporting and enhancing adult, student, and organizational learning should be the PLC’s long-term, enduring goal. The entire school community, moreover, shares responsibility for that continued learning, Martin-Kniep maintains. Teachers and administrators, students, parents, guidance counselors, office staff and janitors, and ommunity members—each of these stakeholders brings unique perspectives and wisdom to the learning process.

Martin-Kniep recently shared her knowledge about PLCs through a day-long, interactive seminar, hosted by JKT & Associates. In that workshop, she asked participants to consider the role PLCs play in improving learning and determine how they could establish a PLC in their setting. It starts, she emphasizes, with a clear definition.

JKT: How do you define professional learning communities?

GM-K: I think of a PLC as a forum of people who embrace the responsibility to learn individually and collectively, in support of adult, student, and organizational learning.

PLCs should be sustainable gatherings of a wide cross section of people that represent the various roles of the school community, including outside stakeholders, such as parents and community members.

Some educators define PLCs as “single-role” communities—there may be a PLC that addresses only teachers’ issues, for example. Or there may be a PLC for instructional leaders.

I believe that PLCs should, by design, bring people together who have different roles and, therefore, very different perspectives on learning issues. PLC members should strive to understand those different viewpoints, and work together to very clearly improve everybody’s learning while addressing the problems of schools.

JKT: How do PLCs differ from other collaborative professional development experiences, such as action research?

GM-K: PLCs are different from other collaborative experiences, such as book clubs, committees, and task groups, in the sense that they’re not focused on single problems and activities. Because the PLC is a permanent school-improvement structure — it’s a forum for continually improving learning — the work of that group is never quite finished. A task group, on the other hand, does end: once you complete the task, you’re done.

PLCs engage in a wide variety of processes including action research and other forms of inquiry —collecting data and analyzing what it tells us about teaching and learning.

JKT: What do educators hope to achieve by participating in a PLC?

GM-K: Because they take time to reconcile their perspectives with those of others, members of a PLC gain a better understanding of the issues that may challenge a school – that’s a key achievement. Unless we check our own understandings against the understandings of students, teachers, administrators, parents counselors, staff developers and so on, we will fail to develop a deep appreciation for other points of view.

That understanding and appreciation helps build a resilient learning organization.

JKT: In your workshop, you discuss readiness. Why is it important that educators “ready” themselves for participating in a PLC?

GM-K: It’s important because not every individual likes to be in a community and not every organization is ready to support professional learning communities. If a teacher is extremely leery of collaboration, she will need coaching to get to a point along the readiness continuum that will allow her participate in a PLC. Likewise, some organizations are highly dysfunctional or autocratic. The work of a PLC in this kind of setting would not be taken seriously.

In my workshop — and in books I’ve written on PLCs -- I suggest that all stakeholders consider where they are on the readiness continuum. We first spend time examining what readiness looks like at different levels and then determine where we fall on that continuum, which then helps us decide appropriate interventions.

In the dysfunctional, autocratic school, for example, a first step might be to intervene with a new leader. If the current leadership doesn’t appreciate the value of other, nontraditional structures, you’ve go no where to go. If, however, a school is making tentative steps — by involving teachers in decision making, for example -- an appropriate intervention would be to beef up those structures, and then move forward.

Just as different organizations have different points of entry, so, too, do individuals. Some people are loners, so a big first step is to help them see how they might benefit from being around others and learning from them.

JKT: What behaviors must educators be willing to leave behind if their work in a PLC is to result in improved student achievement?

GM-K: First and most important, practice cannot be private -- that’s critical. If people aren’t willing to share their practice, it will be hard to improve student achievement.

Traditional forms of hierarchical structures and leadership also have to be abandoned. Any change that is mandated without participation from other stakeholders is tough to implement and is not lasting.

JKT: You have written extensively about the power teachers have to improve student learning. In what ways can school leaders better harness this teacher power?

GM-K: Teachers are the main variable in improving learning. When teachers know effective practices, what they help kids achieve is simply remarkable.

Administrators should tap this teacher expertise. For too long, schools have relied on externally-driven professional development, which rarely leads to sustained growth. There is tremendous experience in schools already that principals aren’t using. There are good teachers in every school—others can benefit from their knowledge.

JKT: Your workshop is one example of online learning. What personal experiences helped you determine how to conduct the workshop?

GM-K: I had one major experience with online learning prior to this workshop. I created a 35-hour professional portfolio course. To be honest, I found the medium to be somewhat limiting in the sense that I missed the real interaction and connection with my students. We did have a live chat, but I think there was too much asynchronous communication, so it was hard to be in community. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for distance learning -- it’s so isolated.

So for the one-day workshop, we tried to use a learner-centered approach. Educators at multiple sites had opportunities to discuss scenarios that illustrated PLC concepts. My role was to debrief those experiences and use the participant’s learning as fodder for what I would bring to the discussion.

Of course, as with any professional development, we won’t know whether the approach is effective until educators implement what they’ve learned in their own settings.

JKT: Describe some of the projects you are now involved in. In what ways are these projects meaningful for you?

GM-K: My current work involves helping to establish PLCs inside schools, changing the whole structures of those schools. In one building, every single member of the school community will be involved in one of three learning communities. We are also working in one system to establish a district-wide learning community, comprised of 11 school teams. Each of those teams hopes to make a difference within their own building. It’s really exciting.

In these projects, we’ve involved students, who bring lot of honesty to the process – and that’s refreshing! Their involvement allows adults to be more focused on the actual practice of teaching and learning and less focused on jargon or talking about what they could do. Students make us “walk the talk,” so to speak.

Working with students has convinced me that they are critical to the school improvement effort. Without students’ voices, we miss having an opportunity to understand the most important role in the organization. The notion that we can speak for students, without involving them, is ridiculous. Students have the ability, insight and motivation to speak about their needs as learners. Involving them in any kind of school improvement effort provides them with a needed voice and gives them the opportunity to put their learning to a real-world use.

Giselle Martin-Kniep is a teacher educator, researcher, program evaluator, and writer. She is the President of Learner-Centered Initiatives, an educational consulting organization specializing in comprehensive regional and school-based curriculum and assessment work. She is also the CEO of Communities for Learning (formerly the Center for the Study of Expertise in Teaching and Learning), an organization committed to helping educators articulate, document and disseminate their expertise about teaching and learning.

Martin-Kniep has written extensively on education issues. Her most recent book is titled Communities that Learn, Lead and Last: Building and Sustaining Educational Expertise, to be published in 2007 by Jossey-Bass. She is working on a new book centered on a framework for effective teaching, which will be published by ASCD.

Martin-Kniep was interviewed for JKT & Associates by Kathy Checkley, a freelance writer in Austin, Texas.
 

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