The role of conversation, contention, and commitment in a professional  (Page 2/6)

School mission statements that promise“learning for all”have become a cliché. But when a school staff takes that statement literally—when teachers view it as a pledge to ensure the success of each student rather than as politicallycorrect hyperbole—profound changes begin to take place. (p.8)

After several more minutes of discussion, the faculty makes its unanimous choice:“ensures”.

These two stories highlight the importance of what I call“the three Cs”of a professional learning community: conversation, contention, and commitment. The preceding storiesrevolve around the creation of school mission statements. At many schools (as at the first school above), mission statements arenothing more than testaments to a superficial energy that ultimately, through ambiguous and non-committal language, neitherunites nor divides organizations. But these statements, and the varying processes used to create them, can reveal much about theunderlying character, culture, and values of a school. In both examples above, faculty members openly discussed and, to a certainextent, disagreed with one another about the ultimate level of accountability that a school and its employees owe to students. Butonly the second school was willing to push the conversation to a deep commitment. As the year progressed for me as an administratorat the second school, I found that the process we experienced in creating a school mission—a process that incorporated all of the three Cs—foreshadowed the larger and lengthier process of developing a successful learning community.

This article examines those three Cs, focusing on the role that conversation, contention, and commitment play inthe development of a professional learning community. Building on my own experiences working as an administrator in a PLC school, andincorporating lessons from research, this article attempts to provide specific advice for school leaders on ways to facilitateconversation, deal with contention, and forge commitment in the pursuit of high-quality teaching and learning.

What is a professional learning community?

The professional learning community concept builds on a variety of previous organizational models and theories.The PLC model incorporates insights from the work of Rosenholtz, McLaughlin, and Darling-Hammond and their examination of theimportance and impact of workplace factors, institutional support for individual professionals, opportunities for collaborativeinquiry, and the process of shared decision-making as they relate to organizational performance (Darling-Hammond, 1996; McLaughlin&Talbert, 1993; Rosenholtz, 1989). The PLC concepts also owes much to Peter Senge’s theory of learning organizations, which emphasizes individual empowerment and improvement, shared goalsetting, collaboration, and the concept of systems thinking (Senge, 1990).

In addition, the PLC model builds on recentresearch into the complexity of dynamic systems, often termed“systems thinking”or“living systems theory”.“Living systems theory”attempts to explain the complexity of organizations through the metaphor of a living system. Baird-Wilkerson (2003) contrastsclassical organizational theory with living systems theory in the following way: