Teachers Learning in Community: Realities and Possibilities

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION BETTY LOU WHITFORD AND DIANE R. WOOD In the last decade, reference to “professional learning communities” has dramatically increased in the literature of both education and business. What, in fact, is a “learning community”? What purposes should learning communities serve? How do they operate? How do participants interact? How should they interact to fulfill their purposes? What motivates people to participate in them—or resist them? What is the relationship between teachers’ learning communities and contemporary demands for accountability and data-based decision making? In other words, do learning communities actually contribute to improving schools and student learning, and how do we know? What conditions would convincingly attest to their efficacy? In the end, how does a learning community differ from any other group of colleagues working together? In this book, we share what we have learned about these questions based on six years of research in a project originally funded by the Lucent Technologies Foundation, with continued funding from AlcatelLucent , following the merger of Lucent Technologies, based in Murray Hill, New Jersey, with a French information technology company, Alcatel. Called the Peer Collaboration Initiative, the project’s first phase established professional learning communities in a set of schools in four districts in New Mexico, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Florida and, in a second overlapping phase, three districts in New Jersey. The foundation also funded two teams of researchers to document the project, provide feedback to the funder and to project participants , analyze outcomes, and engage in dissemination of the research. The authors of seven of the eight chapters in the book were members of these research teams. xi The project designers intended the initiative to support learning communities as an innovative vehicle for teachers’ professional development that would transform the schools’ professional cultures. That is, the project’s aim was to supplant individualistic and privatized approaches to teaching with a professional culture in which teachers make their practices more public and take collective responsibility for student learning. Thus within the Peer Collaboration Initiative, we came to define “learning communities” as small groups of educators who meet regularly to engage in systematic, ongoing, peer support and critique in order to improve their educational practices and student learning. In chapter 1, the editors of the book, Betty Lou Whitford and Diane R. Wood, present two vignettes of learning communities, one highly functioning and one seriously struggling, and they compare and contrast them. In that chapter, we try to capture the complex alchemy required of learning communities so that they can foster the relational and analytic capacities necessary for teachers’ learning communities to make a difference. In chapter 2, Whitford and Debra R. Smith describe the Peer Collaboration Initiative in detail and provide a summary of the experiences in the initial four school districts. This chapter sets the stage for the project, explaining its original vision and scope. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 delve into specific district and school experiences in various policy contexts. In chapter 3, Wood tells the story of what happened in the Pennsylvania school district of “Hillsboro” and analyzes several critical issues affecting the fate of the project. Diane Yendol-Hoppey contributes chapter 4, writing about the influence of high-stakes accountability on collaborative inquiry within learning communities in “Beach County” schools in Florida. Smith, Dick Corbett, and Bruce L. Wilson formed the research team that documented phase two of the initiative, and in chapter 5, they describe the events and effects in the New Jersey districts. In chapter 6, Wood parses and analyzes in detail the meaning of “professional,” “professional learning,” and “professional learning community .” In chapter 7, Ken Jones reflects on the first six chapters, exploring purpose and ends and larger societal pressures on schools, raising concerns about social justice and equity. In the concluding chapter 8, Wood and Whitford explore why fostering teachers as professionals offers the best hope for ensuring student learning, summarizing how learning communities can contribute to professionalizing teachers’ work. Although the authors collectively provide an unflinching portrait of the struggles and limitations of teacher learning communities, they do not eclipse the hopeful promise of these communities. In our last chapter , we argue that learning communities in schools and districts characxii BETTY LOU WHITFORD AND DIANE R. WOOD terized by hierarchically determined goals and directives seem to encourage more compliance than innovation. And yet, in rare instances, when given enough autonomy and time, learning communities did contribute to teachers taking...