Professional Learning Communities: Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement

The term Learning Community appears more often in the language of American educators. Some see it as extending classroom practices into the community, utilizing community resources, both material and human. For others, it suggests bringing community personnel into the school to enhance the curriculum and learning tasks for students. And for many, a learning community includes students, teachers, and administrators reciprocally engaged in learning.

Professional Learning Communities includes stories and reports of research on how school professional staff - teachers and principals - organize as a learning community. It summarizes what professional learning communities look like and how they operate. It identifies the outcomes for staff and students when educators organize a learning community within a school. The publication discusses the attributes of professional learning communities:

• Supportive and shared leadership
• Collective creativity
• Shared values and vision
• Supportive conditions (physical and personal)
• Shared personal practice and what is known about how to create professional learning communities in schools.

This publication will help you understand professional learning communities and what happens when a school staff studies, works, plans, and takes action collectively on behalf of increased learning for students.

SEDL has published several publications about Professional Learning Communities:

• Leading Professional Learning Communities: Voices from Research and Practice
• Professional Learning Communities - Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement
• Professional Learning Communities - An Ongoing Exploration
• Multiple Mirrors: Reflections on the Creation of Professional Learning Communities
• Schools as Learning Communities - Issues About Change, Volume 4, Number 1
• Professional Learning Communities: What Are They and Why Are They Important? - Issues About Change, Volume 6, Number 1
• Creating a Professional Learning Community: Cottonwood Creek School - Issues About Change, Volume 6, Number 2
• Assessing a School Staff as a Community of Professional Learners - Issues About Change, Volume 7, Number 1
• Principals and Teachers: Continuous Learners - Issues About Change, Volume 7, Number 2
• Launching Professional Learning Communities: Beginning Actions - Issues About Change, Volume 8, Number 1
• Co-Developers: Partners in a Study of Professional Learning Communities - Issues About Change, Volume 8, Number 2