Professional Learning Communities at Work TM. Robert Eaker
impossible to create professional learning communities without teachers who function as professionals. The work of the National Council of the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards provide frameworks for the professionalization of teaching. The chapter reviews that body of work and also provides a synthesis of the research on teaching. It describes the unique perspectives and priorities that distinguish teachers in a professional learning community from their more traditional colleagues. It concludes with reflections on teaching in a professional learning community from a former National Teacher of the Year.
Chapter 11 considers the important role that parents play in the education of their children and presents strategies for creating meaningful partnerships between parents and schools. In effective business partnerships, each party is expected to bring specific skills and expertise to the enterprise, to offer a different perspective on issues, to provide support in difficult times, and to contribute toward the achievement of mutual goals. Effective parent-school partnerships are based on similar expectations. This chapter examines the national standards that have been identified for partnerships between parents and schools and suggests ways schools can meet those standards.
Chapter 12 examines staff development practices in a professional learning community. Although many school districts provide a variety of incentives to encourage staff members to improve their individual knowledge and skills, individual learning does not automatically translate into enhanced organizational effectiveness. The professional learning community emphasizes developing the collective capacity of the faculty to achieve school goals. Chapter 12 examines the national standards that have been identified for effective staff development. It argues that opportunities to learn should be integrated in the daily activities of educators, and it offers suggestions for staff development that is anchored in the workplace rather than in workshops.
Chapter 13 stresses the need for patience and persistence when attempting the systemic changes needed to transform traditional schools into professional learning communities. This transformation represents not a task to be accomplished or a project to be supervised, but rather an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement.
Appendix A offers examples of vision statements developed by Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, and the Tintic School District in Eureka, Utah. Appendix B provides a brief summary of several different models that schools might use in their investigation of improvement and curriculum initiatives.
Any individual or organization that is committed to improving public schools should seriously consider how professional learning communities could transform education. Colleges and universities can reference Professional Learning Communities at Work in their preparation programs for teachers and principals. Boards of education and administrative teams can use it as they develop strategic plans for districts and schools. Faculties can use it as the basis of their school improvement efforts. We hope that this book will be used as a tool to stimulate the shared mission, vision, and values; the collective inquiry; the collaborative teams; the action orientation; the commitment to continuous improvement; and the focus on results that we believe are critical to the survival and success of public schools.
Chapter 1
The Disappointment of School Reform
A significant body of circumstantial evidence points to a deep, systemic incapacity of U.S. schools, and the practitioners who work within them, to develop, incorporate, and extend new ideas about teaching and learning in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms.
—Richard Elmore (1996, p. 1)
The demands of modern society are such that America’s public schools must now provide what they have never provided before: a first-rate academic education for nearly all students.
—Phil Schlechty (1997, p. 235)
The history of American education in the second half of the twentieth century is marked by numerous attempts at reform and by increasing public concern. Articles entitled “Crisis in Education,” “What Went Wrong with U.S. Schools,” and “We Are Less Educated than Fifty Years Ago” may have a contemporary ring, but they were published as early as 1957 and 1958 in Life and U.S. News and World Report. In that same era, Arthur Bestor (1953) argued in his best seller, Educational Wastelands, that citizens should wrest control of the public schools from “educationists” who had “dumbed down” the curriculum. With the launching of Sputnik in 1957, many cited the failure of the public schools as the primary reason that the United States had fallen behind Russia in the race to space. Meanwhile, a spate of university-based curriculum reforms, particularly in mathematics and science, emerged as the preferred strategy for resolving the crisis. A quarter of a century later, the ascendance of Japan as an economic power led critics to conclude that the public schools were responsible for America’s fall from its position of unchallenged economic superiority, and a new wave of calls for school reform was issued.
The Rise and Fall of the Excellence Movement
In April 1983 the National Commission on Excellence in Education captured national headlines with its grim assessment of education in the United States. In its report, A Nation at Risk, the commission argued that national security was in peril because of substandard education in American public schools. The commission made frequent references to “decline,” “deficiencies,” “threats,” “risks,” “afflictions,” and “plight.” The opening paragraphs of the report set the tone:
Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world…. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people…. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war…. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. (1983, p. 5)
A Nation at Risk served as a catalyst for a flurry of school improvement initiatives throughout the United States that came to be known collectively as the Excellence Movement. Within two years of the report, more than 300 state and national task forces had investigated the condition of public education in America. The United States Department of Education (1984) described the national response to A Nation at Risk as “nothing short of extraordinary” (p. 11), and Secretary of Education Terrell Bell reported with satisfaction that the arduous work of reform was “already bearing fruit” (p. 8).
The Excellence Movement offered a consistent direction for reform. But it was not a new direction. Schools simply needed to do MORE! Students needed to earn more credits for graduation in courses that were more rigorous and required more homework. Schools needed to add more days to the school year and lengthen the school day. Schools needed to test students more frequently and expect more of teachers both before offering employment and before extending tenure. The reforms of the Excellence Movement simply called for an intensification of existing practices. They contained no new ideas.
Five years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, President Reagan hosted a ceremony in the East Room of the White House to celebrate the school-reform initiatives that the report had helped to launch. Edward Fiske, the former education editor of the New York Times, was among those in attendance. Fiske later wrote:
Leading politicians and educators, as well as those in the national media who cover education, used the occasion to reflect on the accomplishments of school reform. And we came to a startling conclusion: There weren’t any. (1992, p. 24)
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