Teachers Learning in Community: Realities and Possibilities

5. CONTEXT AND COLLABORATION: Growing the Work in New Jersey

鵷 5 鵸 CONTEXT AND COLLABORATION Growing the Work in New Jersey DEBRA R. SMITH, DICK CORBETT, AND BRUCE L. WILSON This book opened with the declaration that teachers’ professional learning communities offer one of the more promising prospects for improving schools. At the same time, it was acknowledged that there are few road maps for just how that might happen. This chapter relates the stories of three districts in New Jersey supported financially, developmentally , and conceptually by the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation to enhance learning prospects for all students in their care. In New Jersey, the groups were dubbed collaborative learning communities (CLCs) rather than LLCs. “How can the lessons of the Peer Collaboration Initiative [PCI, an earlier Alcatel-Lucent-supported reform, described in chapters 1 and 2] inform the design of a new initiative in New Jersey?” was the question posed by Hallie Tamez of The Philanthropic Initiative on behalf of the foundation as she convened representatives of the documentation research team and the National School Reform Faculty (external facilitators for the PCI and the soon-to-be-designed CLC Initiative) in Boston late in 2003. The documentation team members had arrived with a summary of lessons and recommendations that served as the starting point for discussion (see chapter 2). Out of this day of dialogue, and over the next weeks, a new design emerged. New Jersey districts that had demonstrated a degree of 93 readiness and commitment would be invited to apply to participate in a planning year (the 2003–2004 school year). This would entail forming a leadership design team (LDT), comprised of people in different roles, from classroom teachers to central office staff, that would become a learning community, participating in an introductory residential institute during the summer, and then meeting three hours each month with a skilled outside facilitator over the course of the school year. The team then would turn its focus to developing a three-year plan for embedding and expanding learning communities in the context of their districts, considering existing culture, structures, and processes. The data from this chapter include experiences of the authors, who have followed the New Jersey districts through planning and three years of implementation. The foundation also hoped that these districts would begin to form a regional network that would provide sustained collaborative learning opportunities and mutual support across districts. The design of the planning year offered an opportunity to examine whether and how the work with district teams in learning communities leads to a coherent understanding of how learning communities might be incorporated systemically in district change efforts. The plan incorporated both documentation by an external team of researchers1 (i.e., the authors of this chapter) and internal documentation conducted by the learning communities themselves. All of this documentation was intended to contribute to the groups’ learning and to the larger understanding of the learning communities’ experiences. The focus of the documentation during the planning year was to explore the experiences of the learning communities , the role of the external facilitators, and how the experiences of the teams were reflected in their district plans. In subsequent years, the documentation team examined how the CLCs and their work developed, as well as how they influenced, and were affected by, their local contexts. In addition to the monthly visits by the external coaches, support for districts’ systemic incorporation of the CLCs into the fabric of daily life in schools took the form of (1) a cross-district leadership CLC that met several times each year of implementation, (2) continuing cross-district coaches’ seminars, and (3) the development of a cadre of “lead facilitators,” those who first apprenticed to the external facilitators and then began to assume leadership of the CLC support in their own districts , as well as planning and leading the cross-district seminars. In the following sections we tell the New Jersey story, first by describing briefly the context of the three districts.2 Then we use data from our observations of the process to describe a set of themes associated with planning and implementing the CLCs. During the planning 94 SMITH, CORBETT, AND WILSON year, an LDT in each of the districts engaged in five common activities in pursuing the development of a strategy for introducing CLCs into its system. Along the way, the groups also had several similar experiences and realizations that shaped their work. However, as the districts moved into the implementation and the...