By Nicolars Nyambe Tembwe
The increasing need to improve education outcomes has led many countries in the world to embark upon various programmes to reform their education systems.
In view of the challenges that teaching and learning face in the world of globalisation, there is a need for schools to become more proactive in the delivery of their services to learners by maximising the strategies that will ensure that effective learning takes place.
Schools need to ensure that teachers have the necessary professional expertise which will impact positively on learner achievement.
Different reform models have come and gone and at present there is a notion in the international literature that is referred to as “professional learning community.”
The idea of improving schools, particularly teaching and learning by developing professional learning communities is currently being postulated by many scholars.
This article presents some significant aspects of the literature which underpins the concept of a professional learning community. The article also looks at the characteristics and dimensions of PLC with specific reference to the relevant literature. The paper highlights some key aspects with regard to learner achievement in the context of PLC and what kind of strategies can be used in a school where PLC is active and positive.
Finally the paper addresses what the role of school leaders would be in facilitating the development of a PLC in schools.
What is a Professional Learning Community (PLC)?
The professional learning community model follows from an assumption that the main business of formal schooling is not simply to ensure that learners are taught, but to ensure that they learn (Dufour, 2004). It places an emphasis on looking at the learning side of teaching and ensuring that learners benefit from instruction. According to Harris and Jones (2010:173), “A professional learning community is a group of connected and engaged professionals who are responsible for driving change and improvement within, between and across schools that will directly benefit learners.”
In the same vein Bolam et al, (2005:5) describe a PLC “as a group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning-oriented and growth-promoting way operating as an enterprise.”
Therefore PLC is viewed as a model in which teachers collaborate in mapping out strategies to ensure that not only teaching takes place, but to ensure that learners that are taught benefit from the teaching process attaining the required competencies as specified in the different learning programmes.
It is a framework to build teacher capacity to work as members of high-performing, collaborative teams that focus on improving learning (Rentfro, 2007).
This implies that a PLC is an organised group of educators who are committed to learning from each other and interrogate the different teaching methods so that in the end learners will learn.
The school creates a systematic response process to monitor the individual learner’s attainment of the competencies and they ensure that whoever struggles is provided with individualistic support according to the school’s plan of improvement (Dufour, 2004). Therefore, PLC entails a paradigm shift of school culture of ensuring that teachers work in a harmonised environment to ensure that they improve learning. Jessie (2007) adds that a PLC is the way that teachers respond to the needs of their particular school. The whole school community need to work and learn together to take charge of change and ensure that they find the best ways to enhance teaching and learning (Stoll et al, 2006).
They further describe PLC “as a group of people who share and critically interrogate their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning oriented, growth-promoting way”(Stoll et al,2006:223).
This entails that a community of professional teachers who are based within the school and the outside school community particularly parents and other stakeholders can mutually enhance each other’s and learners’ achievement as well as school development (ibid). The concept of PLC is highly connected with the notions of reflective inquiry, and self-evaluation of teachers and schools. Astuto et al, (1993) in (Stoll et al, 2006:223) describes a PLC as one:
“In which teachers in a school and its administrators continuously seek and share learning, and act on their learning.
The goal of their actions is to enhance their effectiveness as professionals for students’ benefits; thus, this arrangement may also be termed communities of continuous inquiry and improvement.”
It is imperative to state that PLC promotes educational reform based on shifting the schools and structure their professional development efforts toward integrating teacher learning into communities of practice with the main objective of maximising the benefits of their learners’ through collaboratively examining their day-to-day teaching practice (Vescio et al, 2006). Teachers engage in the reflections of their own teaching and during this process the focus of their deliberations is the learner. By engaging in such practice, teachers do not only help to improve learners learning but are at the same time being grounded into professionally knowledgeable classroom practitioners (Fernandez, 2002). (Darling-Hammond & Richardson, 2009:3) maintains that ‘in PLC model, teachers work together and engage in continual dialogue to examine their practice and student performance and to develop and implement more effective instructional practices.”
Moreover, the literature seems to emphasise the fact that a PLC is focused on improving teaching practice of the teachers in a given school.
Problems identification and sharing good practices through trusted professional dialogue is what makes up a PLC. Therefore teachers ensure the process of learning with colleagues in small, trusting, supportive groups forms part of the broader PLC model (Dunne, Nave, & Lewis, 2000) as cited in Darling-Hammond and Richardson, 2009).
Thus PLC strongly rests on the ideal that teachers’ interaction outside their classroom has a role to play in cementing improvements in what they do inside their classrooms. This is the case because a PLC puts learners’ achievement first and this can be achieved through extensive structured dialogue among the teaching staff (Louis et al, 1996). It is a model based on the ideology of each one teaches one and all the members of the PLC are regarded as learners in the process of collaborating.
As the school moves forward, every teacher and member of the community engage with colleagues in exploring the question of how best can the learners learn. They also explore the question of what will they do with the learners who do not meet the basic competencies as enshrined in the learning programme of different subjects (Dufour, 2004).
PLC is a deliberate, systematic and well-coordinated learning arrangement in the school that is aimed at giving teachers opportunities to pursue the creation of knowledge through internal networking and interactions. PLC ensures the creation of knowledge through dialogue or conversations among teachers that make presuppositions, ideas, beliefs and feelings explicit and available for further exploration (Dour, 2004). Katz & Earl (2010) adds that through the continuous deliberations and conversations new ideas and teaching practices are created and the initial knowledge is either substantially enriched or transformed during such a process. Therefore, if collaboration and learning together takes place in a school new knowledge is generated and this eventually leads to the new learning which will influence practices of the entire teaching and learning within the school (Katz & Earl, 2010).
The PLC therefore extends classroom practice into the community, bringing the community staff into the school to embrace and interrogate the learning programme and tasks for learners and engaging learners, teachers and principals simultaneously in learning (Hord, 1997). The school community becomes a community of learners and they continuously strive, seek and share learning and the act on what they learn with the focus on learners’ achievement (Harris & Jones 2010, Hord, 1997).
• Nicolars Nyambe Tembwe is employed by the Oshikoto Regional Council: Directorate of Education, as a Senior Education Planner. The author holds a Master’s Degree (MEd) in Educational Administration, Planning & Social Policy from the University of Cape Town.