We have long discussed the goals of professional learning communities (PLCs). Louis et al. define a PLC by describing five aspects of school life which, they would seem to argue, stand to be uniquely impacted by PLCs:

1. Shared values.
2. Focus on student learning.
3. Collaboration.
4. Deprivatized practice. (as in, less private)
5. Reflective dialogue.

Administrators can’t help but look at PLCs and see the potential for a systematic method to improve all five of these areas at once. Five birds, one stone.

These goals have remained intact for the past thirty years. Shockingly, damningly, the obstacles have not changed much, either–perhaps betraying that implementation has been poor. Louis et al. describe two types of obstacles, with examples for each:

• Structural
  • School size
    • Counter-intuitively found in this study not to be related to professional community, so not necessarily an obstacle
  • Staffing complexity
    • The more departmentalized, the more professional community becomes, at best, departmental instead of school-wide
  • Scheduled planning time
  • Teacher empowerment
  • Teacher’s personal sense of responsibility for student learning (debatably should be human/social resources)
• Human/social resources
  • Supportive leadership
  • Openness to innovation
  • Respect
  • Feedback and professional development (debatably should be structural)

Importantly, an obstacle in one context might be an opportunity in another. For example, while discussing human/social resources, one story stood out to the authors, a time when “differences in opinion did not develop into obstacles but became issues for discussion” (p. 784). This is clear for all of these examples. A staff might be “open” or “not open” to innovation, and so on.

Focused solely on “restructuring schools,” the authors conclude with a solution aimed at one small part of the problem: “Changing school structures can enhance professional community” (p. 785). Specifically, the authors recommend giving scheduled time for collaboration and giving authority to teachers to make some decisions about school policies.

However, it is hard to ignore that these are just intermediary, preparatory steps. They might be ingredients, but what’s the recipe? Plan time might be necessary, but what is supposed to happen during the plan time? What policies should teachers be empowered to direct, and how? A danger in an article like this is that an administrator might read it and then begin a “research-based,” district-wide initiative to schedule collaboration time for every teacher, all without any sensitivity to what life is like in a particular school or, even worse, any direction about how the time is supposed to be spent!

I’m left with a question: Can the goal be the plan? If the goal is “collaborate,” surely the plan cannot simply be “go collaborate.”

Louis, K. S., Marks, H. M., Kruse, S. (1996). Teachers’ professional community in restructuring schools. American Educational Research Journal, 33(4), 757–798. DOI Link