Building a Professional Community of Teachers to Improve Learning

This report focuses on improving mathematics learning, but (like many of the articles I’ve read) I believe their claims and conclusions have wider applicability in the community college setting.

The authors begin with the idea that educators (I think we’re focused here on the community college level of education) need to master not only the subject matter they teach but also master teaching and learning. Their recommendation is for expanded networks of professional relationships which would likewise expand educators’ pedagogical repertoires (as well as expand their professional identities).

Individual and isolated teaching, they argue, is artisanal and improvements occur only via individual teacher improvements. Collaborative and collective teaching, on the other hand, is professional and improvements occur via collective-institutional actions.

Furthermore, individual and isolated teaching focuses too much on transferring and assessing static knowledge. Collaborative and collective teaching, on the other hand, focuses more on creating rich learning environments where student engage in conceptual learning.

Early in the report, the authors note that most teaching is conducted in isolation. Many educators like the autonomy that comes with isolation, and many express concern that teaching within strong professional networks may undermine their autonomy. In response, the authors note that teachers who work within strong collaborations actually hold high expectations for themselves, their students, and their colleagues. The isolation that some teachers may prefer may actually be correlated to a sense of demoralization by educators.

citation: Rose Asera, Thomas Carey, Michael Davis, William Moore, Carren Walker, and Suzanne Williams. “Improving Mathematics Learning in Community Colleges: Building a Professional Community of Teachers.” August 2014. http://3csn.org/files/2015/03/professional-community-paper-with-afterword-Feb-5-2015.pdf

Kyla Wahlstrom & Karen Seashore on Professional Community

The title of this source shows that the article focuses on principal-faculty relationships, which is different than my own emphasis on faculty-faculty (or educator-educator) relationships. Despite that caveat, Wahlstrom & Seashore do address elements of teacher-teacher relationships that built trust and professional community.

First, professional community allows supportive interactions between educators, meaning educators can assume multiple professional roles with their colleagues, including: “mentor, mentee, coach, specialist, advisor, facilitator, and so on.” Many of these relationships require colleagues to trust one another enough to fulfill the role.

Second, professional communities share values, as well as a common focus on student learning. Third, colleagues within a professional communities share interactional behaviors including collaboration in instructional development, as well as sharing practices and reflective dialogue.

Fourth, within professional communities, these characteristics and behaviors are “so deeply embedded that teachers are often not aware of them.” In other words, these qualities and actions are normal, desired, and expected.

Fifth, professional community occurs when educators focus their attention on teaching practice rather than on decision-making. As a community college faculty member, most of my out-of-class work is spent sitting on shared governance committees. At a time when shared governance seems to be under attack, I refuse to relinquish my role governing the institution I’m a part of; however, professional community exists when I also work with my colleagues on problems of teaching practice.

citation: Kyla L. Wahlstrom & Karen Seashore Louis. “How Teachers Experience Principal Leadership: The Roles of Professional Community, Trust, Efficacy, and Shared Responsibility.” Educational Administration Quarterly 44.4 (October 2008): 458-495. http://donnaelder.wiki.westga.edu/file/view/How+Teachers+Experience+Principal+Leadership+The+Roles+of+Professional+Community+Trust+Efficacy+and+Shared+Responsibility.pdf

Cori Brewster & Jennifer Railsback on Building Trusting Relationships between Education Colleagues

Trust arises from individuals fulfilling obligations with each other: individuals share vulnerabilities with each other (i.e., when one expresses vulnerability and the other shares back vulnerability of their own). This statement is not a definition of trust but it does illustrate the main condition that must exist for trust to form.

Trust may not translate directly into improved student achievement, but it creates the conditions—both structural and socio-psychological—that make positive changes possible. Without trust, programs meant to improve enhanced student achievement are not likely to take root or be successful.

Brewster & Railsback suggest a number of steps educators and institutions can take to improve trust between colleagues:

• Engage full faculty in activities and discussions related to the schools’ missing, vision, and core values.
• Make new teachers feel welcome.
• Create—and support—meaningful opportunities for teachers to work collaboratively.
• Identify ways to increase and/or improve faculty communication.
• Make relationship-building a priority.
• Choose a professional development model that promotes relationship-building.

Lastly, building trust means avoiding a couple of missteps. First, it’s not enough to merely create opportunity for trust-building; the institution needs to take active steps to actually create it. Second, trust-building won’t happen as the result of a “program” to build trust; instead, actively “re-culturing” the institution is the only viable alternative.

citation: Cori Brewster & Jennifer Railsback. “Building Trusting Relationships for School Improvement: Implications for Principles and Teachers.” [Portland, OR:] Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (Education Northwest), Sept. 2003. http://educationnorthwest.org/sites/default/files/trust.pdf

Karen Seashore Louis on the Culture of Educational Institutions

This article addresses the dual points of defining culture and changing culture. Louis begins by defining what institutional culture is: values, beliefs, and assumptions that institutional members share to influence behavior. That definition tells me that institutional culture is composed of three things.

First, the elements of culture are values, beliefs, and assumptions; that is, values, beliefs, and assumptions constitute culture. Culture is a kind of subjective knowledge—more accurately (as we’ll see below), an agreed upon subjective knowledge—of what is good and bad. Culture is not what is factually true or false, just as it’s not action and behavior, but factual knowledge and action knowledge are implied by the values of culture.

Second, culture is shared in the interactions between people. Individual belief may be a part of culture, but culture really comes alive when people share their beliefs with each other. It’s in the relationships between people, and the result interactions between them, that culture lives when consensual beliefs form.

Third, culture influences behavior. That means culture changes action. The rituals and behaviors we often consider as “culture” (a food we eat, or a dance we perform, or a style of clothing we wear) result from the culture but are not the culture itself. The culture is in the values that lead to the action, but not the action itself.

Louis explains that changing a culture, such as shifting an institution’s way of thinking and way of being, requires three elements: professional community, organizational learning, and trust.

Professional community, the first element, draws our attention away from individuals’ state of being and toward institutional characteristics (including those that effect both educators and students). Stressing community shifts the emphasis of making institutional changes from policy implementation to changing the values of the institution (i.e., “re-culturing”).

Organizational learning, the second element, is adjunct to professional community in that it emphasizes how organizations, institutions, and groups of people learn. Professional development, on the other hand, often emphasizes how individual professionals learn.

Additionally, organizational learning emphasizes an evolutionary approach to continuous improvement. Conventional reform efforts, on the other hand, may emphasize program and policy implementation that adds bureaucracy to an already bureaucratic institutional structure.

Furthermore, organizational learning stresses the importance of developing lateral communication networks in addition to hierarchical connections up and down. Lateral communication tends to be more informal than traditional hierarchical communication, resulting in a shift toward informal communication.

Trust, the third element, is a characteristic of human relationships rather than of institutional policy. As a result, professional relationship development should be built into the very way in which committees, legislative bodies, and other institutional groups function. Conventional models of program change that may involve analyzing problems, identifying potential solutions, and implementing the best possible solution, may not apply to building trust.

Overall, these three components—professional community, organizational learning, and trust—must combine to create institutional culture change. This change is hard to accomplish because it takes a long time to do and because individuals and institutions must be able to handle high amounts of complexity. Cultural change is not about implementing new policies and procedures; rather, it's about changing institutional identity.

Citation: Karen Seashore Louis. “Changing the Culture of Schools: Professional Community, Organizational Learning and Trust.” Journal of School Leadership. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265364969_Changing_the_Culture_of_Schools_Professional_Community_Organizational_Learning_and_Trust

"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.