Schools as Learning Communities

http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/secondary_reading/el200405_dufour.html
Resource Sharing Activity #1
Facilitating, Assessing & Sustaining Professional Learning Communities

Educational Leadership (Article)
Schools as Learning Communities
Richard DuFour

The focus of this article talks about creating a learning community to enhance learning instead of teaching. The article was broken into Big Ideas, focusing on Students Learning, Collaboration, & Results. In the past, individuals have tried to develop various initiatives to promote school reform, but individuals who attempted to get things started really didn’t seem to have a clear idea of what they’re doing. There seemed to be no real focus on what needed to be improved or how to get things improved. Hence, the ideas eventually faded away until someone else tried to come up with something new.
When the movement came along regarding developing Professional Learning Communities, educators needed to first reflect on what would it take to make up this type of community. The “Big Ideas” were developed as a sort of guiding point.
First, educators had to realize that the need to focus on student’s learning and not so much on their teaching, was necessary. In a learning community, questions need to be answered. What do we want our students to learn? The school needed to be quick when identifying students who were struggling. There needs to be intervention in place rather than remediation. How will we know when each student has learned it? How will we respond when a student experience difficulties in learning? Secondly, there has to be a culture of collaboration. The learning community cannot be afraid to work and share together. Once this has been established, teacher can begin to come together to create learning for all students; creating a learning community. The final idea was the results. Working together begins to create an ongoing process of identifying the level of student’s achievement as well as creating a goal to help students achieve mastery in the area of weakness.
The learning community will continue to focus on student learning, how to get them where they need to be, continued to monitor their process through data and as a results continue to use what is working so that it can continue, as well as get rid of what’s not working.
This article goes well with the reading from Martin-Kniep and McRel. In a learning community, everyone becomes a stakeholder in the learning of students, collaboration amongst each other and using what’s learned along with data to keep the learning community strong.



References
Barth, R (1991). Restructuring schools: Some questions for teachers and principals. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(2), 123-128

Marzano, R (2003). What work in schools: Translating research into action. Alexandria, VA: ASCD