Critical and Transformative Practices in Professional Learning Communities.

The concept of a professional learning community, perhaps most ubiquitously understood at present within the framework proposed by Richard Dufour and Robert Eaker (1998), has captured the imagination of North American educators with its promise of fundamentally altering teaching, learning, and the bureaucracy and individualism that pervade so many schools. In Alberta, many current improvement projects receiving envelope funding from the provincial government through the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) outline long-term plans to develop professional learning communities in individual schools and/or across districts. Sergiovanni (2000) represents the agreement that strong and purposeful community is critical to effectiveness when he states, developing a community of practice may be the single most important way to improve a school (p. 139). What Is A Professional Learning Community? The professional learning community (PLC) is one model within a constellation of models and theories characterized by a number of core beliefs: (1) that staff professional development is critical to improved student learning; (2) that this professional development is most effective when it is collaborative and collegial; and (3) that this collaborative work should involve inquiry and problem solving in authentic contexts of daily teaching practices. McLaughlin and Talbert (2006) offer this definition: [T]eachers work collaboratively to reflect on practice, examine evidence about the relationship between practice and student outcomes, and make changes that improve teaching and learning for the particular students in their classes (p. 4). While I focus on the professional learning community specifically for the purposes of this work, the PLC should be understood as an exemplar that also could be more broadly applied to many collaborative professional development models with similar characteristics and defining beliefs. Typically, the professional learning community brings teachers together on a regular basis to engage in collaborative planning, curriculum study, and learning assessment. However, the PLC is more than group work. The language of professional learning community literature promotes two ideals: democratic schools, and schools as Geimenschaft or relationally-bound communities. The democratic ideal is promoted by frequent references to distributed leadership (Lambert, 2003; Zmuda Kuklis & Klein 2004), shared decision making (Gordon, 2004; Sullivan & Glanz, 2006), and an emphasis on dialogue (Dufour & Eaker 1998; Zmuda, Kuklis & Klein, 2004). Collaborative teacher learning calls participants to develop a strong sense of community, the glue of which is responsibility for student learning (Harris & Muijs, 2005). Participants explicate and act on shared norms and values: what Dufour and Eaker (1998) call vision and mission. Lambert (2003) also refers to a shared mission, a collective responsibility for the school (p. 3), and Zmuda, Kuklis, and Klein (2004) describe a collective autonomy and accountability to meet even higher expectations for the as a competent system (p. 181). However, a shared purpose is only a partial definition of community. Lambert includes mutual regard and caring (p. 4) in her conception of collaboration. Mitchell and Sackney (2000) believe that interest in schools as communities is only one aspect of widespread attempts to relieve alienation: [P]eople are engaged in a search for place ... companionship ... identity and belonging (p. 3). In her extensive review of improvement literature, Beck (1999) notes that community in schools is frequently equated with the intimacy of a family or a small village. The PLC model is thus called upon both to benefit work and shared responsibility, yet also, in powerful ways, to meet relationship needs. Transformation or Reformation? …

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