[Building and Connecting Learning Communities: The Power of Networks for School Improvement (NULL)] [By: x] [September, 2009]

by Steven Katz

"Taking your school from great to greater—this compelling book gives you tools to use with staff for reflecting on and refining professional practices. You and your team will find tools for taking learners to the next level of improvement!"—Lynn A. Kaszynski, PrincipalHarrison Street Elementary School, Sunbury, OH Networked learning A powerful school improvement strategy for school leaders! Ideal for school leaders and superintendents leading change efforts, this book describes how separate professional learning communities can be linked across schools by common instructional and learning issues to create dynamic networked learning communities (NLCs). Drawing on their work with schools throughout North America and England, Steven Katz, Lorna M. Earl, and Sonia Ben Jaafar show how participants in NLCs can share professional knowledge that ultimately improves performance at the school and district level. Through a sample school narrative, the book illustrates how NLCs can significantly enhance instruction, increase student performance, and empower local professional learning communities. This resource Demonstrating how NLCs—small or large, local or statewide—can promote critical reforms while strengthening the work of individual professional learning communities, this invaluable resource reveals how educators can join forces across school and district boundaries to generate deep, meaningful, and sustainable change.

Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

Reviews

[Peter Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Building & Connecting Learning Communities, the authors begin by stating that networked learning communities can be powerful mechanisms for school improvement but only if important preconditions are in place. They have drawn upon their extensive professional development and research experience to identify these enablers.

The three enabling factors they identify for successful networked learning communities are as follows:

- Clear and defensible learning focus for students, teachers, and leaders;
- Collaborative inquiry that challenges thinking and practice; and
- Both formal and informal instructional leadership.

They recommend as best “cross-school networks of within-school PLCs” (17).
While the authors believe in the power and potential of collective wisdom, they also recognize that it is not without its perils. When working together is marked by groupthink, social loafing, or a general lack of knowledge, the results can be disappointing and even disastrous.

In Chapter 3, the authors elaborate on how to set a clear and defensible NLC focus. They maintain that, in order to avoid the activity trap, the focus should be evidence-based and involve a combination of data and belief. To formulate a hypothesis for inquiry, group members should first identify what they think they know about their focus and then draw on data from student achievement and from teaching and assessment practices. Most importantly, they emphasize that the “glue” that will hold NLC’s together is a focus that will impact on classroom practice and student achievement.

The importance of relationships in collaborative inquiry is the focus of Chapter 4. Relational trust - comprised of respect for each others’ dignity and ideas, belief in each other’s competence, and confidence in each other’s belief in putting students first – needs to be cultivated in any NLC. Furthermore, the relationships in a NLC need to be based on a deep level of collaboration, which is beyond just sharing ideas and stories. Group members must be willing to make their tacit beliefs and assumptions known to each other and be open to learning not only from each other but from the evidence uncovered during the collective inquiry. By doing so, teachers and leaders will move from what Michael Barber calls uninformed professional judgment to informed professional judgment. (47)

The authors contend that there should be co-leadership in a PLC – both a formal leader and informal leader. They explore 4 roles for formal leaders in PLCs:

- Encouraging/Motivating others, particularly by modeling what “not knowing” looks like and
cultivating a climate of intellectual challenge in schools;

- Setting and monitoring the agenda, which means helping to establish and maintain the
focus (Leaders support staying the course by focusing on alignment and by buffering.);

- Sharing leadership, by enabling others with expertise to also provide leadership; and,

- Building capacity – personal, interpersonal, or organizational capacity.

The main contribution of informal leaders should be to provide instructional expertise.

Chapter 6 focuses on the key link between student and teacher learning in professional learning networks. Once the needs assessment is completed in a PLC regarding the knowledge that students need to acquire, the next step in the professional learning cycle is an assessment of the skills and knowledge teachers need to acquire to enable the student learning. Only by deepening teachers’ professional knowledge can students be engaged in new learning experiences that will impact their learning. The authors suggest the use of protocols, such as the CASL process (give background on student, then have teachers share observations, and then move to analysis and planning of next steps), during teacher moderation to avoid the “niceness” culture and encourage them to debate assessment and instructional practices.

Chapter 7 addresses the question, What should the learning look like for leaders so that they can enable job-embedded teacher learning in PLCs? The key learning for leaders should be in how to create the conditions by which their schools become true learning communities. Some specific strategies offered for leaders are the use of critical friends, the use of protocols, and the use of reflective diaries to track their own learning.

Building and Connecting Learning Communities concludes with some convincing arguments on how PLCs and NLCs sustain learning in schools. For one thing, they push educators, through a process of internal accountability, to take the lead in their own professional learning. As well, because they promote distributive leadership, they protect schools against dramatic changes in direction from administrative changes.

A great feature of this book is the running narrative which is a composite of sorts of the authors’ experiences of working with numerous networks in a variety of countries.