How are Professional Learning Communities Created?; History Has a Few Messages

Mr. Joyce has long been involved in efforts to develop collaborative professional inquiry. He looks back at some of those efforts in the hope that we can draw lessons from them and finally realize the vision that Mike Schmoker set forth in his February article. In the article featured on the cover of the February Kappan, Mike Schmoker develops two important arguments about school renewal.1 The first is a powerful call to discard the approaches variously known as strategic planning, systemic reform, comprehensive school reform, and whole-school reform, which have failed miserably and in plain sight. The second, which has the style of a call to arms, is that we know the best way to generate school improvement and should simply get on with it. He borrows the words of Judith Warren Little: "School improvement is most surely and thoroughly achieved when teachers engage in frequent, continuous, and increasingly concrete and precise talk about teaching practice. "2 Schmoker argues that we have a "consensus of expert opinion" on the question, and he names 28 highly visible specialists in school improvement who agree, essentially, that schools should become centers of inquiry for adults as well as children. He urges them to spread the word, to create the "tipping point," when educators embrace "the most productive shift in the history of educational practice. "3 Here, I'd like to reflect on Schmoker's call to arms from the perspective of research and experience with similar ideas over the last 40 years. Why? Because I'd like to see the dream of professional communities of inquiry work out well this time around. And for that to happen, we need to pay attention both to the idea of schools in which adults study their practice and to the ways of creating that condition. I like the vision Schmoker offers -- so much, in fact, that I've been involved in efforts to disseminate similar visions since the early 1960s. I was heavily involved in the "team-teaching" movement and the post-Sputnik academic reform movement. Both relied on collaborative study by teachers. I directed the school at Teachers College, where teams not only studied teaching but produced research for dissemination. In the teacher education program connected to our school and nearby New York schools, teacher candidates studied both teaching and collaborative school improvement. We were part of the national "competency-based" campaign that emphasized collective inquiry into teaching beginning at the preservice level. We introduced teacher candidates to professional learning communities while they were in training and gave them tools for studying teaching -- tools known as "interaction analysis systems. " At one point, at least a hundred teacher education programs and many large school districts used such tools. For example, the schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, built a cadre of teachers who spread the precise study of teaching through a district that then served a quarter of a million students. Those innovations have largely disappeared, but I have not reformed, though my tools have changed. As this is written, I am working with inquiring teams whose members are studying the effects of the curricula they are implementing, as in the kindergartens of the Northern Lights School Division in Alberta, British Columbia. We discussed these efforts in these pages in October 2003.4 I know from personal experience that commitment to an idea is different from knowing how to take effective action to make it happen. I have frequently helped people with fine ambitions spin their wheels because we didn't know enough about generating implementation. Today, I have more or less continual anxiety that my present shortcomings will generate a new set of mistakes by my clients. And I'm in good company. The broad literature on school renewal describes many failed attempts to build learning communities, attempts mounted by sophisticated people, armed with considerable energy and carefully constructed strategies. …