The Role of Conversation, Contention, and Commitment in a Professional Learning Community.

The process of creating a professional learning community can be di cult, lengthy, and incredibly rewarding. Based on the author's experiences working as an administrator in a professional learning community school, this article discusses the role that conversation, contention, and commitment play in the development of a PLC, and includes speci c suggestions and strategies for school leaders engaged in building a professional learning community in their own schools. note: This module has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and sanctioned by the National Council of the Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a scholarly contribution to the knowledge base in educational administration. It is 1997, I am a third-year teacher, and the faculty of my high school is engaged in a contentious debate. The school is going through a re-accreditation process, and as part of the process we are required to reexamine the school's mission statement. A sub-committee has drafted a new mission for faculty review, and they are now presenting the mission statement to the entire faculty at an after-school meeting. One of the members of the sub-committee has put on the overhead a transparency that reads, We will provide a high-quality education to all students, and debate among the faculty begins. Opinions come from all sides of the room as teachers struggle with the level of individual and institutional responsibility for student learning that they are willing to assume. Finally, one English teacher, John, raises his hand and argues, We can't promise a high-quality education to all students. The best that we can do is to provide the opportunity for a good education. Then it is the students' responsibility to take advantage of that opportunity. It is not our fault if the students don't work hard, if we don't have parental support, or if the town doesn't give us a big enough budget. At a certain point, our students' success is simply out of our hands. ∗Version 1.1: Jan 22, 2007 1:25 pm -0600 †http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ http://cnx.org/content/m14270/1.1/ OpenStax-CNX module: m14270 2 Many members of the faculty murmur their assent, while others shift uncomfortably. I am dissatis ed with this argument and the lack of accountability that it suggests, but I remain quiet. After several minutes of further discussion, a nal version of the mission statement is approved: We will provide the opportunity for a high-quality education for all students. And, for the next seven years, I remember my frustration. Fast forward to 2004. I am now beginning an administrative internship as an assistant principal at a new middle school in North Carolina. The faculty is in summer Boot Camp , preparing for the school's opening in several weeks, and we are several hours into the process of writing the school's mission statement. A sheet of paper hangs at the front of the room, and on it is the line: We are a collaborative community that __________ high student achievement. The faculty has put forth multiple contenders to ll in the blank: focuses on , prioritizes, provides for , and, nally, ensures. After considerable discussion, the principal raises his hand, reminds the faculty that our new school is being built on a professional learning community model, and reads a quote from a recent Rick DuFour article (2004): School mission statements that promise learning for all have become a cliché. But when a school sta takes that statement literally when teachers view it as a pledge to ensure the success of each student rather than as politically correct hyperbole profound changes begin to take place. (p.8) After several more minutes of discussion, the faculty makes its unanimous choice: ensures . These two stories highlight the importance of what I call the three Cs of a professional learning community: conversation, contention, and commitment. The preceding stories revolve around the creation of school mission statements. At many schools (as at the rst school above), mission statements are nothing more than testaments to a super cial energy that ultimately, through ambiguous and non-committal language, neither unites nor divides organizations. But these statements, and the varying processes used to create them, can reveal much about the underlying character, culture, and values of a school. In both examples above, faculty members openly discussed and, to a certain extent, disagreed with one another about the ultimate level of accountability that a school and its employees owe to students. But only the second school was willing to push the conversation to a deep commitment. As the year progressed for me as an administrator at the second school, I found that the process we experienced in creating a school mission a process that incorporated all of the three Cs foreshadowed the larger and lengthier process of developing a successful learning community. This article examines those three Cs, focusing on the role that conversation, contention, and commitment play in the development of a professional learning community. Building on my own experiences working as an administrator in a PLC school, and incorporating lessons from research, this article attempts to provide speci c advice for school leaders on ways to facilitate conversation, deal with contention, and forge commitment in the pursuit of high-quality teaching and learning. What is a professional learning community? The professional learning community concept builds on a variety of previous organizational models and theories. The PLC model incorporates insights from the work of Rosenholtz, McLaughlin, and DarlingHammond and their examination of the importance and impact of workplace factors, institutional support for individual professionals, opportunities for collaborative inquiry, and the process of shared decision-making as they relate to organizational performance (Darling-Hammond, 1996; McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993; Rosenholtz, 1989). The PLC concepts also owes much to Peter Senge's theory of learning organizations, which emphasizes individual empowerment and improvement, shared goal setting, collaboration, and the concept of systems thinking (Senge, 1990). In addition, the PLC model builds on recent research into the complexity of dynamic systems, often termed systems thinking or living systems theory . Living systems theory attempts to explain the complexity of organizations through the metaphor of a living system. Baird-Wilkerson (2003) contrasts classical organizational theory with living systems theory in the following way: An integrated living-systems view of change is di erent from the commonly accepted Newtonian, or mechanistic, view of change. The mechanistic paradigm espouses that organizations run well if they operate like a machine, separated into narrow processes that are linked together. The mechanistic perspective posits that preservation of an organization is preservation of its current form therefore leaders manage the parts so that the machine continues to function predictably. From a living-systems view of change, organizations http://cnx.org/content/m14270/1.1/ OpenStax-CNX module: m14270 3 are systems that self-organize, create, think, adapt, and seek meaning. If the organization violates any of these imperatives, the system will fail. The key then for change work is facilitating a process and building organizational capacity to honor these imperatives. By doing so, the organization is able to learn from itself and create appropriate and relevant change e orts based on new knowledge; hence, it is self-organizing and functions as a learning organization. (p.6-9) According to Rick DuFour (2004), one of the leading professional learning community proponents, a functioning PLC exhibits three key features, which incorporate elements of the previously mentioned organizational models: • Ensuring student learning By agreeing to ensure student learning, a school sta creates a commitment to a common understanding, common goals, and a common language. • Developing professional collaboration Through regularly scheduled, team-based professional collaboration, a school connects individual members in ways more likely to lead to innovation and to mutually agreed-upon and consistently implemented decisions, thus connecting disparate parts of a dynamic organization. • Focusing on results The process of identifying, analyzing, and addressing agreed-upon student and school data reinforces a common vision and vocabulary, connects curricula and instruction across classrooms, reinforces organizational norms, and aligns leadership and sta . Within the PLC structure, conversation, contention, and commitment play critical roles. Conversations become the medium of information exchange and the foundation of organizational learning. Contention, when handled productively, exposes di erences of opinion and practice and creates space for growth. Finally, commitment ensures that organizational e orts are grounded in a common understanding of purpose and values. The remainder of this article explores these three Cs in more detail, with speci c recommendations on ways to use the three Cs within an organizational context. 1 The First C: Conversation Conversations happen all the time in schools. There are formal conversations, such as the ones that occurred in the two stories at the beginning of the article, or the ones that occur in department or grade-level meetings. There are also informal conversations: one teacher stopping by another teacher's room after school, stories told and retold in the teachers lounge, even electronic conversations through e-mail or discussion board exchanges. In a PLC, conversations become the lifeblood of organizational learning, and the nature of those conversations can di er markedly from the types of conversations typically found in business as usual schools. What distinguishes conversation in a professional learning community? Primarily two things: the purposeful na