"On Building Professional Community in Schools"

Conventional ideas of professional development (i.e., the “professionalization” of teachers’ work) claim the individual teacher should learn teaching and management skills that will make them more effective in the classroom or in the governance of the institution.

Kruse, Louis, and Bryk argue that the school, not the individual, should be the focus of change. Empowerment of educators is good, they state; however, empowerment is effective at improving instruction and student success only when it’s embedded within a professional community.

Community enhances professionalism in a number of ways. First, community creates norms and enforces high standards of learning, instruction, and professional behavior (esp. obligation toward one another and toward one’s students). Second, community creates a stronger sense of motivation than mere compliance. And third, community creates structure for principled disagreement and discussion.

The authors list five elements that comprise strong professional communities (or, one might think of these as five signs that an educational institution has a strong professional community): (1) reflective dialogue occurs, (2) the practice of teaching is de-privatized (meaning, teachers don’t work solely as individuals; their work is outside of the silos we often encounter), (3) the focus of professional learning is on student learning, (4) collaboration is common, and (5) the institution exhibits shared norms and values (most likely centered on student learning).

Lastly, they say that structural conditions are important to creating professional community (e.g., conditions such as having enough time to meet and talk, or communication structures and protocols that encourage conversation and collaboration). However, they continue, human and social resources receive too little attention and are more important than structural conditions (e.g., resources such as trust and respect, supportive leadership, or a general openness to improvement).

This article provides a clear rationale for developing professional community, explains some of the signs of professional community, and describes many of the conditions and resources necessary for creating professional community.

citation: Sharon Kruse, Karen Seashore Louis, and Anthony Bryk. “Building Professional Community in Schools.” Issues in Restructuring Schools, Issue Report No. 6 (Spring 1994): 3-6.

Ducklows' Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry

Convention problem-solving techniques begin by identifying shortcomings or needs in the status quo (i.e., what does not exist, or what is not). Appreciative inquiry, on the other hand, identifies what is working in the status quo (i.e., what does exist, or what is). What is not can be translated into what might be (by replacing the problem with a new action that reduces or eliminates the problem), but what is can be translated into what might be, also (by enhancing or strengthening what works in the status quo).

Appreciative inquiry seeks to identify what gives life to organizations, and what activates people’s energies and competencies. As a result, examples, stories, and metaphors can be more important than fact and opinion statements. The communicative patterns that constitute appreciative inquiry, in turn, develop members’ commitment and confidence to their work.

citation: “Appreciative Inquiry: A Paradigm Shift for Social Systems,”accessed 24 July 2015, at http://theducklows.ca/downloads/AISystemsChange.pdf

Asking Not Telling: Edgar Schein on Humble Inquiry

My professional community project is about fostering trust and respect within the relationships between my educational colleagues. Edgar Schein, in his book Humble Inquiry, shows that trust is built when colleagues share vulnerabilities with each other.

For instance, in an interaction, when one person takes a risk by disclosing something, and the other person reciprocates that risk by disclosing something back, then they may develop trust between each other. In short, trust forms: (1) in communicative interactions, (2) when one person gives something, and (3) when the other person gives something back.

Schein claims we live and work in a culture of task-accomplishment (e.g., identifying problems and solutions) rather than a culture of relationship-building (cultivating trust and respect for our colleagues). This claim makes intuitive sense to me because it seems institutional changes on campus occur by designating committees who collect data showing a need for change and implement policy programs that will mitigate, reduce, or eliminate those needs. Building relationships as an approach to institutional change is not the norm.

Humble inquiry, the subject of Schein’s book, is an alternative approach to institutional change. Our conventional culture of “telling” (i.e., speaking to others in order to influence them) presumes that the speaker (the one doing the telling) knows about the other (the one doing the listening). Humble inquiry (i.e., listening to others in order to align our common purposes), on the other hand, presumes that we do not know the other, and that it’s important to ask (inquire) with an attitude of humility.

Humble inquiry asks open-ended questions in order to learn about the other: the questions are not loaded, the interactions are neither scripted nor ritualistic, and the answers are not preconceived.

The challenge for me and my project is to determine ways to supplement the institutional culture of my campus with humble inquiry. The current program of policy committees is not entirely consistent with humble inquiry. But my goal is not to replace one with the other; instead, it is to enhance the current program with alternatives that might bring slow and steady improvements.

citation: Edgar H. Schein. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler, 2013.

Judith Warren Little on the Relationship between Professional Community and Professional Development

Judith Warren Little’s essay “Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School” is a significant essay for its description and justification of professional community at an educational institution. Little's essay is directed at K-12 education, but I think her comments may apply to college campuses as well.

The essay gives abundant food-for-thought about the nature of professional development and how it meshes with professional development. My summary will be selective and I’ll report only the ideas that are most relevant to my project.

A significant change in educator professional learning is a shift from individual expertise and commitment to the institution’s expertise and commitment. In other words, previously most professional development aimed to improve educators’ teaching skills; whereas nowadays educators engage in professional learning mostly to serve a larger goal of institutional improvement (e.g., improving student success).

A shift from an individual educators’ development plan to the development of the whole educational institution as a whole occurs because the institution is the entity responsible for student success. A resulting implication is that professional learning should be a social endeavor rather than an individual and solitary activity.

Little argues that professional community is a necessary part of any successful school. In fact, as professional community becomes an integral component of student success, the very essence of professional development evolves into a broader and deeper sense of professional learning. Unfortunately, many of these beneficial changes are conceptual and theoretical rather than practical and actual.

At the same time, the concepts of cooperation and collaboration shouldn’t be confused with professional community. Accomplishing tasks together (i.e., cooperation and collaboration) does not mean the same thing as developing trust, respect, and a mutual responsibility for student learning (i.e., community).

Because professional community can be difficult to preserve, specific communication practices, and interactional resources and protocols can help educators create and maintain professional community. Furthermore, educators must embrace and enact values that support learning.

The relationship between professional development (i.e., techniques to enhance teaching) and professional community (i.e., cultivating trust and respect) is a reciprocal relationship. Successful professional learning is a combination of professional development and professional community.

And that leads to my own personal thesis: professional learning = professional development plus professional community. Or, put another way: PL = PD + PC.

citation: Judith Warren Little. “Professional Community and Professional Development in the Learning-Centered School.” Washington, DC: National Education Assn., Dec. 2006. http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/mf_pdreport.pdf

Linda Shadiow on Stories as Faculty Learning (part 2)

In my previous post, I summarized the first half of Linda Shadiow’s book What Our Stories Teach Us, and described how educators can use stories as a tool for professional learning. This is accomplished by, first, identifying stories of “critical moments” within our professional life, and second, analyzing those stories to uncover their significance. Now I'll continue this summary by describing the process of locating the underlying ideology revealed by the story.

Once you have identified a story and analyzed it, the third step is to use the story to identify the claims and assertions underlying your educational practices. Specifically, you try to understand what your story reveals about what you think about education, about yourself, about your methods and teaching style, and about your students. In short, your story exemplifies values, and you want to figure out what those values are and what they mean.

A story’s values are disclosed through (among other things) turning points in the story (moments that mark a clear before-and-after sequence in the plot), dialectical tensions, and dissonances. For example, stories may exemplify tensions or disconnects between opposing inclinations such as: intentions to act vs. actual behavior, what an educator wants to do vs. what they should do, actions that are good for us vs. actions that are good for students, and routine or ordinary events vs. extraordinary or unusual events.

The benefit of story analysis is that it shows to us the frameworks that underlie our teaching practices. Thereby we have a better feel for which of those frameworks we want to keep in place or strengthen, and which one we might want to reconsider or change.

And then, ironically, analyzing our stories of educational moments creates new stories (i.e., that time we analyzed our stories) that we reflect upon and share later on.

Shadiow also presented many of these ideas at a POD Network (Professional and Organizational Development Network) conference in 2010. The conference materials show that the session followed the book by encouraging session participants to identify an educational story, analyze the story for its components, and search for the underlying frameworks revealed by the story.

In the session description, Shadiow argues that educators may seek to make positive changes in their mid-career teaching practices, but may not have an easy way to accomplish that change. The solution, she offers, is to apply an auto-ethnographic analysis of one’s teaching stories to uncover or excavate the ideology or framework that allows for change.

The remaining pages of the conference session materials include handouts and worksheets that show the kind of story analysis she advocates throughout her book.

citations:

Linda K. Shadiow. What OurStories Teach Us: A Guide to Critical Reflection for College Faculty. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.

Linda K. Shadiow. “CriticallyReflective Teaching: Excavating Assumptions and Pratices.” POD AnnualConference, St. Louis, Nov. 2010.