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Learning Communites: professional learning 3

John Travers
There has been much discussion in staff development circles about learning communities as a key basis for sustained school and staff learning, and the concept has been mentioned regularly in SICTAS discussions. Learning Communities can sound like a woolly exercise from the 1970s but that is not the way it is being practices in good schools today.

Andy Hargreaves is an educator with a long standing high reputation in school improvement and he talks often about professional maturity which is a prerequisite for effective learning communities. There may appear to be a contradiction between this 'gentle' approach to school improvement and the 'hard' test based approach to accountability that some countries and systems have implemented. However there is a comprehensive approach that is gaining currency that is based on real professionalism which combines the best of principles of professional learning through learning communities accompanied by rigorous accountability.

The diagram below illustrates the elements that Hargreaves sees in a professional learning community. He is a passionate believer in the true professionalism of good teaching, the essentially moral purpose of teaching and its pivotal role in helping society adjust to the demands of the knowledge society. [Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity ]



Andy Hargreaves [OECD 'Teachers Matter' 2004 ]

Hargreaves explains how teachers can only respond to the emerging new learning needs of their students by being continuing learners themselves. They can maintain this with good leadership and by learning alongside and with their colleagues. But he and other writers in this field such as Richard Elmore are not talking about the   professionalism that was evident during my early years as a school principal in the '70s and '80s which I think was not yet professionally mature. There wasn't enough concentration on the elements to the right of the diagram - evidence based on a focus on learning and teaching. We were moving in those days away from a rigid and narrow curriculum to a very different one, serving a quite different society and the emphasis was on collaboration. Today we are still on the move to a new curriculum and professional learning and accountability have to be achievable side by side.

Tags: sictas sictascollab sictaswork school development
Posted at 12:25PM Dec 04, 2008 by John Travers  |