WHAT IS A PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITY?

BY
Richard DuFour
The idea of improving schools by developing professional learning
communities is currently in vogue. People use this term to describe every
imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in educationa gradelevel teaching team, a school committee, a high school department, an entire
school district, a state department of education, a national professional
organization, and so on. In fact, the term has been used so ubiquitously that it
is in danger of losing all meaning.
The professional learning community model has now reached a critical
juncture, one well known to those who have witnessed the fate of other wellintentioned school reform efforts. In this all-too-familiar cycle, initial
enthusiasm gives way to confusion about the fundamental concepts driving
the initiative, followed by inevitable implementation problems, the conclusion
that the reform has failed to bring about the desired results, abandonment of
the reform, and the launch of a new search for the next promising initiative.
Another reform movement has come and gone, reinforcing the conventional
education wisdom that promises, This too shall pass.
The movement to develop professional learning communities can avoid this
cycle, but only if educators reflect critically on the concept's merits. What are
the big ideas that represent the core principles of professional learning
communities? How do these principles guide schools' efforts to sustain the
professional learning community model until it becomes deeply embedded in
the culture of the school?
Big Idea #1: Ensuring That Students Learn
The professional learning community model flows from the assumption that
the core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are
taught but to ensure that they learn. This simple shiftfrom a focus on
teaching to a focus on learninghas profound implications for schools.
School mission statements that promise learning for all have become a
clich. But when a school staff takes that statement literallywhen teachers
view it as a pledge to ensure the success of each student rather than as
politically correct hyperboleprofound changes begin to take place.

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The school staff finds itself asking, What school characteristics and practices
have been most successful in helping all students achieve at high levels? How
could we adopt those characteristics and practices in our own school? What
commitments would we have to make to one another to create such a school?
What indicators could we monitor to assess our progress? When the staff has
built shared knowledge and found common ground on these questions, the
school has a solid foundation for moving forward with its improvement
initiative.
As the school moves forward, every professional in the building must engage
with colleagues in the ongoing exploration of three crucial questions that
drive the work of those within a professional learning community:
What do we want each student to learn?
How will we know when each student has learned it?

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How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?

The answer to the third question separates learning communities from
traditional schools.
Here is a scenario that plays out daily in traditional schools. A teacher teaches
a unit to the best of his or her ability, but at the conclusion of the unit some
students have not mastered the essential outcomes. On the one hand, the
teacher would like to take the time to help those students. On the other hand,
the teacher feels compelled to move forward to cover the course content. If
the teacher uses instructional time to assist students who have not learned,
the progress of students who have mastered the content will suffer; if the
teacher pushes on with new concepts, the struggling students will fall farther
behind.
What typically happens in this situation? Almost invariably, the school leaves
the solution to the discretion of individual teachers, who vary widely in the
ways they respond. Some teachers conclude that the struggling students
should transfer to a less rigorous course or should be considered for special
education. Some lower their expectations by adopting less challenging
standards for subgroups of students within their classrooms. Some look for
ways to assist the students before and after school. Some allow struggling
students to fail.
When a school begins to function as a professional learning community,
however, teachers become aware of the incongruity between their
commitment to ensure learning for all students and their lack of a coordinated
strategy to respond when some students do not learn. The staff addresses this
discrepancy by designing strategies to ensure that struggling students receive
additional time and support, no matter who their teacher is. In addition to
being systematic and schoolwide, the professional learning community's
response to students who experience difficulty is:

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Timely. The school quickly identifies students who need additional time
and support.
Based on intervention rather than remediation. The plan provides
students with help as soon as they experience difficulty rather than relying on
summer school, retention, and remedial courses.
Directive. Instead of inviting students to seek additional help, the
systematic plan requires students to devote extra time and receive additional
assistance until they have mastered the necessary concepts.
The systematic, timely, and directive intervention program operating at Adlai
Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, provides an excellent example.
Every three weeks, every student receives a progress report. Within the first
month of school, new students discover that if they are not doing well in a
class, they will receive a wide array of immediate interventions. First, the
teacher, counselor, and faculty advisor each talk with the student individually
to help resolve the problem. The school also notifies the student's parents
about the concern. In addition, the school offers the struggling student a pass
from study hall to a school tutoring center to get additional help in the course.
An older student mentor, in conjunction with the struggling student's advisor,

helps the student with homework during the student's daily advisory period.
Any student who continues to fall short of expectations at the end of six
weeks despite these interventions is required, rather than invited, to attend
tutoring sessions during the study hall period. Counselors begin to make
weekly checks on the struggling student's progress. If tutoring fails to bring
about improvement within the next six weeks, the student is assigned to a
daily guided study hall with 10 or fewer students. The guided study hall
supervisor communicates with classroom teachers to learn exactly what
homework each student needs to complete and monitors the completion of
that homework. Parents attend a meeting at the school at which the student,
parents, counselor, and classroom teacher must sign a contract clarifying
what each party will do to help the student meet the standards for the course.
Stevenson High School serves more than 4,000 students. Yet this school has
found a way to monitor each student's learning on a timely basis and to
ensure that every student who experiences academic difficulty will receive
extra time and support for learning.
Like Stevenson, schools that are truly committed to the concept of learning
for each student will stop subjecting struggling students to a haphazard
education lottery. These schools will guarantee that each student receives
whatever additional support he or she needs.
Big Idea #2: A Culture of Collaboration
Educators who are building a professional learning community recognize that
they must work together to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all.
Therefore, they create structures to promote a collaborative culture.
Despite compelling evidence indicating that working collaboratively
represents best practice, teachers in many schools continue to work in
isolation. Even in schools that endorse the idea of collaboration, the staff's
willingness to collaborate often stops at the classroom door. Some school
staffs equate the term collaboration with congeniality and focus on building
group camaraderie. Other staffs join forces to develop consensus on
operational procedures, such as how they will respond to tardiness or
supervise recess. Still others organize themselves into committees to oversee
different facets of the school's operation, such as discipline, technology, and
social climate. Although each of these activities can serve a useful purpose,
none represents the kind of professional dialogue that can transform a school
into a professional learning community.
The powerful collaboration that characterizes professional learning
communities is a systematic process in which teachers work together to
analyze and improve their classroom practice. Teachers work in teams,
engaging in an ongoing cycle of questions that promote deep team learning.
This process, in turn, leads to higher levels of student achievement.
Collaborating for School Improvement
At Boones Mill Elementary School, a K-5 school serving 400 students in rural
Franklin County, Virginia, the powerful collaboration of grade-level teams
drives the school improvement process. The following scenario describes what
Boones Mill staff members refer to as their teaching-learning process.
The school's five 3rd grade teachers study state and national standards, the
district curriculum guide, and student achievement data to identify the

essential knowledge and skills that all students should learn in an upcoming
language arts unit. They also ask the 4th grade teachers what they hope
students will have mastered by the time they leave 3rd grade. On the basis of
the shared knowledge generated by this joint study, the 3rd grade team
agrees on the critical outcomes that they will make sure each student
achieves during the unit.
Next, the team turns its attention to developing common formative
assessments to monitor each student's mastery of the essential outcomes.
Team members discuss the most authentic and valid ways to assess student
mastery. They set the standard for each skill or concept that each student
must achieve to be deemed proficient. They agree on the criteria by which
they will judge the quality of student work, and they practice applying those
criteria until they can do so consistently. Finally, they decide when they will
administer the assessments.
After each teacher has examined the results of the common formative
assessment for his or her students, the team analyzes how all 3rd graders
performed. Team members identify strengths and weaknesses in student
learning and begin to discuss how they can build on the strengths and
address the weaknesses. The entire team gains new insights into what is
working and what is not, and members discuss new strategies that they can
implement in their classrooms to raise student achievement.
At Boones Mill, collaborative conversations happen routinely throughout the
year. Teachers use frequent formative assessments to investigate the
questions Are students learning what they need to learn? and Who needs
additional time and support to learn? rather than relying solely on
summative assessments that ask Which students learned what was intended
and which students did not?
Collaborative conversations call on team members to make public what has
traditionally been privategoals, strategies, materials, pacing, questions,
concerns, and results. These discussions give every teacher someone to turn
to and talk to, and they are explicitly structured to improve the classroom
practice of teachersindividually and collectively.
For teachers to participate in such a powerful process, the school must ensure
that everyone belongs to a team that focuses on student learning. Each team
must have time to meet during the workday and throughout the school year.
Teams must focus their efforts on crucial questions related to learning and
generate products that reflect that focus, such as lists of essential outcomes,
different kinds of assessment, analyses of student achievement, and
strategies for improving results.
Teams must develop norms or protocols to clarify expectations regarding
roles, responsibilities, and relationships among team members. Teams must
adopt student achievement goals linked with school and district goals.
Removing Barriers to Success
For meaningful collaboration to occur, a number of things must also stop
happening. Schools must stop pretending that merely presenting teachers
with state standards or district curriculum guides will guarantee that all
students have access to a common curriculum. Even school districts that
devote tremendous time and energy to designing the intended curriculum

often pay little attention to the implemented curriculum (what teachers

actually teach) and even less to the attained curriculum (what students learn)
(Marzano, 2003). Schools must also give teachers time to analyze and discuss
state and district curriculum documents. More important, teacher
conversations must quickly move beyond What are we expected to teach?
to How will we know when each student has learned?
In addition, faculties must stop making excuses for failing to collaborate. Few
educators publicly assert that working in isolation is the best strategy for
improving schools. Instead, they give reasons why it is impossible for them to
work together: We just can't find the time. Not everyone on the staff has
endorsed the idea. We need more training in collaboration. But the number
of schools that have created truly collaborative cultures proves that such
barriers are not insurmountable. As Roland Barth (1991) wrote,
Are teachers and administrators willing to accept the fact that they are part of
the problem? . . . God didn't create self-contained classrooms, 50-minute
periods, and subjects taught in isolation. We didbecause we find working
alone safer than and preferable to working together. (pp. 126127)
In the final analysis, building the collaborative culture of a professional
learning community is a question of will. A group of staff members who are
determined to work together will find a way.
Big Idea #3: A Focus on Results
Professional learning communities judge their effectiveness on the basis of
results. Working together to improve student achievement becomes the
routine work of everyone in the school. Every teacher team participates in an
ongoing process of identifying the current level of student achievement,
establishing a goal to improve the current level, working together to achieve
that goal, and providing periodic evidence of progress. The focus of team
goals shifts. Such goals as We will adopt the Junior Great Books program or
We will create three new labs for our science course give way to We will
increase the percentage of students who meet the state standard in language
arts from 83 percent to 90 percent or We will reduce the failure rate in our
course by 50 percent.
Schools and teachers typically suffer from the DRIP syndromeData
Rich/Information Poor. The results-oriented professional learning community
not only welcomes data but also turns data into useful and relevant
information for staff. Teachers have never suffered from a lack of data. Even a
teacher who works in isolation can easily establish the mean, mode, median,
standard deviation, and percentage of students who demonstrated proficiency
every time he or she administers a test. However, data will become a catalyst
for improved teacher practice only if the teacher has a basis of comparison.
When teacher teams develop common formative assessments throughout the
school year, each teacher can identify how his or her students performed on
each skill compared with other students. Individual teachers can call on their
team colleagues to help them reflect on areas of concern. Each teacher has
access to the ideas, materials, strategies, and talents of the entire team.
Freeport Intermediate School, located 50 miles south of Houston, Texas,
attributes its success to an unrelenting focus on results. Teachers work in
collaborative teams for 90 minutes daily to clarify the essential outcomes of

their grade levels and courses and to align those outcomes with state
standards. They develop consistent instructional calendars and administer the
same brief assessment to all students at the same grade level at the
conclusion of each instructional unit, roughly once a week.
Each quarter, the teams administer a common cumulative exam. Each spring,
the teams develop and administer practice tests for the state exam. Each
year, the teams pore over the results of the state test, which are broken down
to show every teacher how his or her students performed on every skill and
on every test item. The teachers share their results from all of these
assessments with their colleagues, and they quickly learn when a teammate
has been particularly effective in teaching a certain skill. Team members
consciously look for successful practice and attempt to replicate it in their own
practice; they also identify areas of the curriculum that need more attention.
Freeport Intermediate has been transformed from one of the lowestperforming schools in the state to a national model for academic
achievement. Principal Clara Sale-Davis believes that the crucial first step in
that transformation came when the staff began to honestly confront data on
student achievement and to work together to improve results rather than
make excuses for them.
Of course, this focus on continual improvement and results requires educators
to change traditional practices and revise prevalent assumptions. Educators
must begin to embrace data as a useful indicator of progress. They must stop
disregarding or excusing unfavorable data and honestly confront the
sometimes-brutal facts. They must stop using averages to analyze student
performance and begin to focus on the success of each student.
Educators who focus on results must also stop limiting improvement goals to
factors outside the classroom, such as student discipline and staff morale, and
shift their attention to goals that focus on student learning. They must stop
assessing their own effectiveness on the basis of how busy they are or how
many new initiatives they have launched and begin instead to ask, Have we
made progress on the goals that are most important to us? Educators must
stop working in isolation and hoarding their ideas, materials, and strategies
and begin to work together to meet the needs of all students.
Hard Work and Commitment
Even the grandest design eventually translates into hard work. The
professional learning community model is a grand designa powerful new
way of working together that profoundly affects the practices of schooling. But
initiating and sustaining the concept requires hard work. It requires the school
staff to focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively on
matters related to learning, and hold itself accountable for the kind of results
that fuel continual improvement.
When educators do the hard work necessary to implement these principles,
their collective ability to help all students learn will rise. If they fail to
demonstrate the discipline to initiate and sustain this work, then their school
is unlikely to become more effective, even if those within it claim to be a
professional learning community. The rise or fall of the professional learning
community concept depends not on the merits of the concept itself, but on
the most important element in the improvement of any schoolthe
commitment and persistence of the educators within it.

References
Barth, R. (1991). Restructuring schools: Some questions for teachers and
principals. Phi Delta Kappan, 73(2), 123128.
Marzano, R. (2003). What works in schools: Translating research into action.
Alexandria, VA: ASCD.