RSA #2 "Professional Learning Communities: Developing a School-Level Readiness Instrument"

"Professional Learning Communities: Developing a School-Level Readiness Instrument"

This collaborative article represents the efforts of the New Brunswick Provincial Schools to form a University partnership so that the schools and the university could collect and analyze data relating to the readiness of the schools and districts to develop PLC's (at the school, district, and provincial level) which would then initiate curricular and operations reforms.
The introduction clarifies definitions of key terms.
A PLC:
1. shares values and vision
2. holds collective responsibility
3. engages in reflective professional inquiry
4. collaborates
5. promotes learning

The Organizational Characteristics essential to determining readiness include:
1. culture
2. leadership
3. capacity-building

The Operational Characteristics essential to determining readiness include:
1. Professional Development
2. Data Collection
3. Systemic Trust
(With a little imagination, it's easy to see how attitudes towards these characteristics can correlate with Martin-Kniep's dispositions).

The project included teams from four schools. Each team had five members including a lead teacher, a principal, and three teachers. The team developed a scale to help groups monitor their readiness for PLC collaboration. Sixty questions were designed to correlate with the scale and the questions were distributed to all four schools. The results of the surveys helped the teams determine current levels of readiness and identify barriers that must first be addressed before successful PLC integration could begin. The most common barrier turned out to be the self-imposition of isolation, especially among high school teachers. Many teachers even given the chance to work in groups would choose to work alone.
Clearly there is a lot left to be done to convince teachers that collaboration and collegiality are assets.



Mitchell, C. C., & Sackney, L. L. (2002). Relationships in the Study of Learning Communities. School Effectiveness & School Improvement, 13(4), 453. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.