Leading professional learning: think 'system' and not 'individual school' if the goal is to fundamentally change the culture of schools

School Administrator, Nov, 2006 by Michael Fullan

I have deliberately selected the term "professional learning" in the title rather than professional learning communities, not because I do not value the latter but rather because I think the more fundamental issues of professional learning will be neglected if we pursue PLCs in a direct manner.

I have three reasons to be worried about the spread of professional learning communities. First, the term travels faster and better than the concept. Thus we have many examples of superficial PLCs--educators simply calling what they are doing professional learning communities without going very deep into learning and without realizing they are not going deep.

This is a kind of you-don't-know-what-you-don't-know phenomenon. So problem one is the danger and likelihood of superficiality.

Second, people make the mistake of treating professional learning communities as the latest innovation. Of course in a technical sense it is an innovation to the people first using it, but the moment you treat it as a program innovation, you run two risks. One is that people will see it as one innovation among many--perhaps the flavor of the year, which means it can be easily discarded once the going gets rough and as other innovations come along the following year.

The other risk is that once you see it as an innovation to be implemented you proceed in a fashion that fails to appreciate its deeper, more permanent meaning. Professional learning communities are in fact about establishing lasting new collaborative cultures. Collaborative cultures are ones that focus on building the capacity for continuous improvement and are intended to be a new way of working and learning. They are meant to be enduring capacities, not just another program innovation.

Third, professional learning communities also can be miscast as changing the cultures of individual schools rather than their deeper meaning that PLCs need to be part and parcel of creating new multiple-school district cultures. I know of more than one superintendent who bemoans the fact that this or that school has a wonderful internal professional learning community but eschews working with other schools.

The work of transforming schools means all or most schools, and this means it is a system change. For system change to occur on a larger scale, we need schools learning from each other and districts learning from each other. We call this "lateral capacity building" and see it as absolutely crucial for system reform. Put another way, individual, isolated PLC schools are verboten in any deep scheme of reform, and the PLC as an innovation can easily slip into this trap. The third problem then is how PLCs can unwittingly represent tunnel vision, reinforcing the notion of the school as an autonomous unit.

I am, in effect, arguing we must keep our eye on the more basic purpose to which PLCs are presumably a solution. The basic purpose, in my view, is to change the culture of school systems, not to produce a series of atomistic schools, however collaborative they might be internally.

Without a deeper concern for transforming cultures of all schools, these three problems--superficiality, the PLC as a program innovation and the focus on individual schools--can easily marginalize the value of professional learning communities as part of the movement to transform school system cultures.

Convincing Research

Richard Elmore, in his 2004 work School Reform From the Inside Out: Policy, Practice and Performance, argues that decades of school reform have only touched the surface through structural and curriculum initiatives that have failed to get inside the classroom in any telling way.

The research is very convincing on this score. I recently reviewed this work carefully in completing the 4th edition of my own work, New Meaning of Educational Change. Even reform efforts that had millions of dollars and political will behind them, along with focusing on many of the right strategies (standards, assessment aligned with standards, curriculum revision, plenty of professional development for teachers and principals and even professional learning communities) have failed to make much of an impact in the classroom.

The Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform in 2005 conducted case studies of major districtwide reform efforts in Chicago, Milwaukee and Seattle. While noting the three cases had a lot of positive things going for them, when all was said and done their bottom-line conclusion was this: "The three districts had decentralized authority and resources to the schools in different ways and had undergone significant organizational changes to facilitate their ambitious instructional improvement plans. The unfortunate reality for the many principals and teachers we interviewed was that the districts were unable to change practice on a large scale."

Another case in point, described in Reform as Learning by Lea Hubbard and others in 2006, is the revealing account of how San Diego fared under an assertive change strategy with a lot of focus and resource support. The strategy involved a strong focus on instruction with school principals being trained and supervised as instructional leaders, and the role of area superintendents being converted to instructional leaders. The strategy moved too fast and too aggressively until a backlash of cumulative resistance resulted in a change of leadership along with a change of strategy. Some gains were made in literacy and math at the elementary level, but the difficulty of accomplishing widespread change in classroom instruction took its toll in the face of a highly pressurized strategy.