RSA #1 “Avoiding Learning Team Burnout”

RSA #1 “Avoiding Learning Team Burnout”
This article from Education Week’s teachermagazine.com website deals with a very realistic and important problem. Many schools are beginning the year with Professional Learning Committee initiatives that fade out through the school year for several different reasons. The article seeks to identify some reasons that PLC’s fizzle, and poses solutions to rectify the problem. The author, Anne Jolly, is a former middle school science teacher and won the Alabama Teacher of the Year award before becoming a Director for Professional Learning Teams for a consortium of Southern educators. So we can assume her insights come from real experience (Jolly, 2007).

Among the biggest problems that lead to PLC breakdown, according to Jolly, are the stresses of time, the negativity within some groups, and the haziness of community goals. To counteract all these problems, Jolly makes several recommendations. Among these, several recommendations resonated with Martin-Kniep’s concluding chapters in Communities that learn, lead and last (2008). Specifically, Jolly (2007) maintains that groups must develop clear benchmarks for success and reflectively measure themselves against these benchmarks over time. Furthermore, the group should balance discussion and debate with the development of concrete products that embody the efforts of the group. In these two ways, as with Martin-Kniep (2008), you have a group that is clearly directed towards thoughtful, tangible outcomes.

What struck me as useful and different about Jolly’s perspective were her recommendations about the affective needs of the group. In particular, she suggests ways to embrace a positive attitude, a relaxed atmosphere, and a sense that experimentation and even failure are an acceptable part of the group learning process (2007).

Jolly, A. (2007). Avoiding learning team burnout. Teacher Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2007/04/04/22tln_jolly_web.html?r=1600455345.

Martin-Kniep, G. O. (2008). Communities that learn, lead, and last. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.