1. “When people have a passion and a purpose that is
theirs, not someone else’s, and when their passion is
pursued together and is sharpened by a sense of
urgency, there are no limits to what they can achieve.”
Hargreaves and Frink (2006)
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2. A Professional Development
Cycle
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As teachers wait, endlessly for the right research
or staff development program…

3. Consider this:
 Our schools perform at current levels,
despite immense challenges
 What would happen if we redirected all
this heart and energy into simple,
proven practices: systematically
identifying, cultivating, refining, and
honoring the vast untapped fund of
collective expertise already in our midst
– and celebrating each small
instructional victory, one at a time?
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4. Forty Years of Reform Strategies
 1970’s uninformed professional
judgment
 1980’s uninformed prescription
 1990’s informed prescription
 2000’s informed professional judgment
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5. Informed Professional Judgment
 Professional judgment involves groups
of teachers and others who value
difference, disagreement, and debate
over the best ways to identify and
implement needed improvements.
 It’s about how teachers promote, value,
and bring together formal evidence and
experiential knowledge and intuition as a
basis for decision-making.
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6. A Professional Learning
Community is…
 A community where diverse people have
a shared commitment to a common
purpose. Communities support each other
in pursuing goals and acknowledge and
include all views. The communities focus
on…
 learning of the students, the adults, and
the organization. These learning
communities are…
 professional in how they value
deliberation and discussion.
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7. Groupthink
 Many groups that have been labeled PLC’s
are not because members are more
interested in being nice to one another than
probing deeply into issues that sometimes
divide education.
 Like all communities, learning communities
can become victims of “groupthink,” where
members insulate themselves from
alternative ideas – turning shared visions
into shared delusions
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8. Double-Loop Learning: An
Alternative to Groupthink
 A thermostat is a single-loop learner. It
is programmed to increase or decrease
heat in order to keep temperature
constant.
 A thermostat could be a double-loop
learner if it could inquire why it should
measure heat and why it is set so that
the temperature is constant. It is
inquiring into underlying values.
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9. Thermostats?!?
 Twinning the Portman bridge to handle the
traffic-flow into Vancouver is an example of
single-loop learning.
 Studies have shown that when congestion
is relieved initially by building roads or
bridges, there is a 30% (more people move
to the suburbs) increase in travel, which in
turn leads to more congestion, and air and
noise pollution than before the road
building. Questioning the value of fucusing
on traffic flow is an example of double-loop
learning.
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10. What does this have to do with
PLC’s?
 Improving teaching methods is an
example of single-loop learning.
 Asking why the same kinds of students
continue to experience difficulty, despite
improved teaching methods is an
example of double-loop learning. This is
about questioning the value of improving
teaching methods.
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11. Creative Destruction
 The need to obliterate the past to create
the future.
 This often results in endless swings of
the pendulum, increased burnout, and
an unnecessary waste of accumulated
expertise and memory.
 There is an alternative…
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12. Creative Recombination
 Sustainable improvement is about the
future and the past.
 It doesn’t treat people’s knowledge,
experience, and careers as disposable
waste (think about resistance) but as
valuable, renewable, and recombinable
resources. While PLC’s should never
blindly endorse the past, they should
always respect and learn from it.
 And so…
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13. The moment we begin to work with the
past, not against it or in spite of it, is the
moment we will see an end to repetitive
change syndrome and the widespread
resistance that results from it.
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14. So what do PLC’s do?
 The core mission of PLC’s is not simply to
ensure that students are taught, but that
students learn.
 Improving teaching methods (single-loop
learning) is the meat and potatoes of PLC’s.
 However, they continually monitor student
learning at the school, classroom and
individual level to ensure students are
learning. If all students in all classes are not
developing to their potential, PLC’s treat
current classroom interactions as problematic
(double-loop learning).
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15. The Time Factor
 Treating classroom interactions as
problematic takes a lot of time whereas
learning new teaching methods can be
done quickly.
 Yes, but…
 Remember the fade and fizzle pattern
that is typical of a lot of educational
reforms.
 Going slower produces faster real
change.
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16. How To Make PLC’s Fail…
 Create a sense of betrayal in teachers when
promised resources fail to materialize or abruptly
disappear
 Create a sense of frustration with shifting levels of
endorsement or support from school leaders
(hedging bets, backing off, caving in)
 Encourage a sense of dismay over conflicts with
colleagues and/or a failure of collegial support
 Ignore the possibility of emotional and physical
exhaustion associate with extra and unfamiliar
responsibilities
 Keep the definition of PLC’s broad enough to
encourage disagreement over what they are
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