Education Innovation

Key Drivers Of The PLC Evolution- Part 5

There are six “key drivers” that I see pushing Professional Learning Communities to evolve into Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives. They are Technology, Wisdom Stewardship, Cultural, Accountability, External Approach, and Continuous Change, Choice, and Disruption. These six “key drivers” are having a major impact on education and make the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative uniquely suited to handle the impact effectively.

Lets examine “key driver” number six.

6. Continuous Change, Choice, and Disruption: Increasing rate of development in the number of choices, options, disruptive ideas & technologies, and new paradigms,

Disruptive ideas: According to Peter Sheahan, author of Flip, “…innovations in product and process almost always have unintended consequences that challenge our ability to adapt, and reward those with flexibility to flip into new modes of acting and thinking.”

Think of Twitter, it has moved from a fun mini-blogging site, to instant messaging, to part of the Personal Learning Network of many people, to an international news broadcasting agency during the Iran crisis. I believe Twitter is the ultimate semi real-time idea sharing platform, but that is not what was originally intended for it. Cell phones have become personal computing devices capable of doing so much more than make phone calls. PNLC look for the opportunity to use ideas and technology in new and disruptive ways to better their collaboration.

This is the underlying principle of Disruptive Technology as described by Clayton Christensen in his book Disrupting Class. What you think is not useful or effective, suddenly becomes very effective and replaces the prior model, idea, strategy, curriculum, technology, etc. PNLC are aware of this possibility and practice a level of awareness that sees, what I call "Disruptive Ideas" on the horizon.

New Paradigms: As the authors of The Power of Impossible Thinking put it, "Sometimes we don't need to merely 'sharpen' the saw; we need to throw it out to pick up a power tool. If we are focused only on sharpening, then we might not see the opportunity to apply new technology that can radically change the way we approach the task."

Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives utilize the most powerful of all mindset of paradigms. I call it the “Utility Paradigm.” All mental models, all technologies, all paradigms have utility in certain situations. The ability for a PNLC to look at a problem through the lens of various mental models or paradigms will provide valuable perspective. PNLCs however are quick to adapt to new technologies and look for way they can be utilized to better collaborate to improve student learning.

Choice and Options: Teachers and administrators are faced with increasing choices in curriculum, teaching materials, educational software, and technology. Being able to sort through all these choices requires an enormous amount of time, energy, and use of resources. Teachers and administrators are being asked to be savvy enough to make informed and fiscally sound decisions in an environment where the amount of choices is growing daily.

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is able to draw upon a greater network of people who have the expertise, knowledge, data, and information to help in real-time with making effective and sound decisions that are in the best interests of the students. 

So today, and increasingly in the future, it is the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative that will be able to handle these drivers of change. The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative embraces and seeks to leverage the technological changes because in so doing, they are better able to utilize the resources of time and talent because they have accepted the cultural shift toward immediacy of real-time interaction, and therefore is better able to handle the increasing compliance issues facing education. With both and internal focus and external approach members are better able to handle, and in fact embrace, the continuous change, new disruptions, and increases in choices and options.

Key Drivers Of The PLC Evolution- Part 4

There are six “key drivers” that I see pushing Professional Learning Communities to evolve into Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives. They are Technology, Wisdom Stewardship, Cultural, Accountability, External Approach, and Continuous Change, Choice, and Disruption. These six “key drivers” are having a major impact on education and make the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative uniquely suited to handle the impact effectively.

Lets examine “key driver” number five.

5: External Approach: The need for organizations and teams to look outside themselves to expand their network with new members who are sources of learning, creativity, and innovation.

According to Time magazine, the world produced 161 exabytes. That equals 161 billion gigabytes. Imagine that. In other words, the world produced three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written in one year. It is simply not possible to keep up with all the new information, research, learning, data, etc on student learning that is out there. Time requires teams that can adjust to this situation by understanding that in addition to a necessary internal focus, they need to also have an external approach to their work.

Boundary Crossing: Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives understand that the answers to questions, necessary data, important information, or key knowledge my lay outside of the team members sitting at the table. PNLC understand that boundaries of grade level, school site, subject matter, job function, etc. that have preveiously isolated PLCs should not be allowed to prevent the necessary knowledge reaching PLC members. PNLC members, therefore understand, that anyone anywhere can be a source of valuable and or necessary resource to them.

Concurrent Perspective: PLCs have typically been internally focused. They focus on developing strong norms, processes for communicating, problem solving, building consensus, etc. This is important, but PNLCs understand that equally important is understanding how their work fits into the needs of those outside of the team. They are externally focused and internally focused. They do not wait to create and establish internal norms or practices for every aspect of their work, but rather, get on with the work meeting the needs of students, the grade level, department, school, district, and the team together. They also keep an eye out for trends in technology, new research, and new strategies, and new compliance issues developing outside of the group.

It is a little more difficult and messy, but that the reality is that the school day and school year are too short to spend valuable time solely focused on internal aspects and neglect the external needs as well.

Networked: The Professional Networked Collaborative understands the power of the network. Useful outsiders become part of the network that the PNLC taps into to increase student learning and achievement. The network of useful outsiders exists physically and virtually and changes over time.

Flexible and Scalable: PNLC are flexible in who is part of the group, how long that person will be part of the group, the way in which the group will work, who is leading the group, etc. The PNLC is scalable in size, growing to include new useful outsiders or including new networks. But the PNLC is also flexible as to who, when, what, and how the group uses networks and outsiders.

Key Drivers Of The PLC Evolution- Part 3

There are six “key drivers” that I see pushing Professional Learning Communities to evolve into Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives. They are Technology, Wisdom Stewardship, Cultural, Accountability, External Approach, and Continuous Change, Choice, and Disruption. These six “key drivers” are having a major impact on education and make the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative uniquely suited to handle the impact effectively.

Lets examine “key driver” number four.

4. Accountability: Increasing transparency in complying with expanding federal, state, and local laws in addition to categorical program monitoring requirements, and labor contracts. 

The degree to which schools are increasingly required to effectively to comply with compliance issues continues to grow. So too, the number of ways in which schools are held accountable through increasing transparency.

Your school’s or district’s test scores can be looked up and examined by people living anywhere in the world. From the parents on your P.T.A, to the teachers across town, to the principals across the country, to professors in the farthest reaches of the globe.

The California Department of Education has a site called DataQuest. This site allows anyone with web access to look up and examine school performance data, test scores, student demographic data, school staffing information, student misconduct and intervention data, etc. This is the very definition of transparency. And parents are using this data to make informed decisions about which schools they want their students to attend and even making home buying decisions based on that data. Yep, it’s not just parents who are digging into your school’s information; realtors are using that information to market homes. Who else will soon find a use for your school’s data? It’s out there, transparent for everyone to see.

Educators across the country are acutely aware of the forces of Accountability.

Top Down Accountability: Legislation such as NCLB is making schools more accountable for their results. The federal Department of Education, state departments of education, county offices of education, and districts all provide top down accountability. For good or bad, accountability is a factor that impacts education everyday.

Lateral Accountability: Principals, unfortunately, often compete for students by offering programs that will attract students and comparing one school to another. Public schools and private schools have a lateral accountability dynamic. Competition is a natural result of all the transparency layered into a space where there are limited resources.

Bottom-up-accountability: Being transparent to the public, the community can make choices about which schools they want to send their students to. If they don’t feel you are meeting their needs, there is a school that will. Parents and teachers are able to spread opinions and views of your school or district via the digital world. Your school or district is apt to be branded good or bad by the views and opinions of the grassroots in your community.

No team can afford to miss the opportunity to collaborate with and get the best from all available “people” resources. PNLCs enable teachers to more effectively meet the needs of students and satisfy the various compliance issues by increasing the effectiveness of the team through greater access to expertise, knowledge, information, strategies, research, and by doing so during the contractual hours of the teachers’ school day.

Key Drivers Of The PLC Evolution- Part 2

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are six “key drivers” that I see pushing Professional Learning Communities to evolve into Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives. They are Technology, Wisdom Stewardship, Cultural, Accountability, External Approach, and Continuous Change, Choice, and Disruption. These six “key drivers” are having a major impact on education and make the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative uniquely suited to handle the impact effectively.

Lets examine “key driver” number three.

3. Cultural: the increasing desire for real-time feedback, the expectation of immediacy and the compression of time and space

Peter Sheahan writes in his book Flip, “Human beings have always been impatient. Today we expect things to happen faster than ever before. And not just a little bit faster, but over the last few years a lot faster. The quicker something can be something can be done, the quicker we expect it to happen…”

Time is one of the most crucial resources any PNLC has. Teams of teachers using the resource of time meeting together to meet the needs of students must make as effective use of time as possible. The PNLC will allow educators to leverage the cultural changes in our society, one being the expectation of immediacy. We are comfortable with Instant Messaging, Twitter, web cams, etc. As the technologies continue to become part of our greater culture, the immediacy of which we expect responses from others will only increase.

If data can be pulled up in an instant with databases such as Edusoft or Data Director, why not people? The PNLC will see it as natural that people else where with knowledge, expertise, data, and information to share will participate in real-time collaboration through use of synchronous technologies such as video or phone-conferencing. Why wait for answers when you can have instant real-time feedback?

No teacher would argue that the increasing demands of high stakes testing and legislation such as NCLB is driving them to get more teaching squeezed into the same amount of days. Education is going to have to adapt to the compression of time as we asked to do more in the same space of time.

The compression of space from physical to physical and virtual will change the nature of what can be done collaboratively. As the world gets “smaller” we are going to have more opportunities to interact with people from all over the world, whether in person or through technology. This may create more opportunities for our teams to collaborate with and learn from those who have expertise, data, information, or direct knowledge to help increase students learning. Collaboration across the world via technology is the result of compressed space and distance.

Tom Peters summed it up best when he said, “Distance is dead.” The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative embraces it.

Professional Learning Community- Harness The Power of "Q"

Research has proven that Professional Learning Communities are one of the most powerful educational paradigms. The Professional Learning Community takes the individual teacher and hooks them into a network of their grade level or department level peers. This network in turn makes it possible for teacher to leverage the power of those present at the table to do more for students.

I have advocated that technology and other key drivers have created an environment in which individual Professional Learning Communities can be networked with, not only other Professional Learning Communities, but useful individuals such as specialists, district personnel, researchers, etc. I call this model the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. The essence of the PNLC is that the “who” of potential members and collaborators is increased exponentially because of individual members networking through collaborative technology platforms, the “what.” Educators working together in the ongoing purpose of increasing student learning and achievement while sharing physical space, virtual space, or both simultaneously.

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative makes use of what network researchers call a “small world network.” Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius, explains that small world networks consist of, “…many densely connected small groups with less strong connections.”

Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University and Jarrett Spiro of Stanford University studied the 20the century Broadway musical industry, an industry in which many teams of people created projects, and then moved on to new projects, but maintained varying levels of interconnectedness. The Broadway musical industry was a network. From their research the derive a single number, which they called “Q.” Q is a measure of how densely interconnected the entire community is.

As Keith Sawyer points out, “When Q is low, there aren’t many links among teams, and those links aren’t very strong. When Q is high, the teams are connected by more and more people who know people on the other teams. If Q is very high, then teams are connected by many members and everyone has worked with everyone else multiple times.”

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative attempts to harness they power of Q by creating connections with many more people than the team members sitting at the table. As these connections increase and are frequently re-visited, the level of Q increases.

Connections are the key. More connections increase the surface area of the typical PLC and exposes them to many more people who can contribute in meaningful ways to the work of the PLC.

“Connections expose a team to new sources of creative material. But if the network is totally connected, there is less diversity of ideas and the web risks falling into a rut of conventional styles. Recall the research showing that brainstorming groups often fall into groupthink and become less innovative than solitary workers. The most creative web is the one in which good connections exist among the teams, but the teams still enjoy independence and autonomy.”

Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives leverage the INDIVIDUAL networks of each member. No two networks look the same; therefore the PNLC is leveraging multiple unique networks. This uniqueness helps to offset the problem of groupthink and allows the PNLC the autonomy and professional discretion that Professional Learning Communities enjoy.

Want to raise the IQ of your teacher collaboration, then create your own Professional Networked Learning Collabortive and harness the power of Q. More Q equals more IQ.

Dumber Together? Brainstorming in a Professional Learning Community

You have seen it before. The PLC agenda says, “Brainstorm ideas for…” You look around and see the chart paper, pens, and Post-It notes lying on the table, and you think to yourself, “Why do we waste the time.”

You know the rules of brainstorming in PLCs…
1. No criticism
2. Wild ideas are welcome
3. Quantity is the goal, the more the better.
4. Look for combinations of previous ideas and improvements on previous ideas.

You also know that it helps if your PLCs…
1. Stay focused
2. Stick to one conversation at a time
3. Get visual and physical
4. Use chart paper, white boards, Post-It notes, etc.

You know all these things. But does it work the way you hope it would. Are your PLC brainstorming sessions effective? Are they creative? Do they produce quality ideas to drive instruction and increase student achievement?

According to Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius, “In many organizations, the group ends up being dumber than the individual members.”

Why you ask?

Because, according to Sawyer, “…decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

In other words, instead of brainstorming, you should brain assemble. Put the ideas generated by individual teachers alone into an “idea pool” an assemblage of ideas.

It not that these rules of common brainstorming don’t work, it just that they work best when done by one’s self. “These studies just show that the rules work better when people use them alone than when they use them in groups.”

A lot of bad ideas are of no use to a PLC. What is needed is a lot of good ideas, or at least as many good ideas as the team is capable of generating.

But what makes an idea “good?”

According to Sawyer, we often judge ideas based on the wrong criteria. “Most people use the wrong criteria to evaluate their ideas; they think about what will work, about what worked before, or about what is familiar to them.”

What if you judged ideas based on how creative, how original, how unique, or how valuable they are? If you knew this is how ideas generated by PLC team members would be measured, chances are the teams would generate more creative ideas. You should give directions to your PLC teams that explain this.

Sawyer refers to this as “critical instructions.”

Telling your PLC that we want well thought out ideas that meet the instructional needs of students, ideas that are practical, unique, valuable, and high quality; no silly or impossible ideas.

Establishing an evaluation criterion for ideas sounds counter-intuitive, but Sawyer cites studies that show brainstorming sessions are more productive when participants are told their ideas will be evaluated for creativity and that, in fact, participants are more creative than with no criteria at all.

So instead of just telling your PLC teams to fill up a piece of chart paper with ideas, give them “critical directions” and judge them according to your pre-established criteria. You will turn brainstorming into an effective PLC tool, instead of a time wasting activity that fills ups chart paper but does nothing to improve quality of ideas developed using "critical instructions" and "idea criterion." Use the "new rules" of brainstorming.

Six Steps To Becoming A Professional Learning Community Coach

I have advised those concerned with the performance of Professional Learning Communities to gain fresh insight into how PLCs behave and information about how to drive improvement or fix problems is to play the role of the anthropologist.

The Anthropologist is one of the three learning personas from the Tom Kelley's The Ten Faces Of Innovation. See the full post here (The Anthropologist- Observing Your Professional Learning Communities)

According to Kelley, the Anthropologist practices 6 principles
1. Anthropologists practice the Zen principle of “beginner’s mind”
2. Anthropologists embrace human behavior with all its surprises
3. Anthropologists draw inferences by listening to their intuition
4. Anthropologists seek out epiphanies through a sense of “Vuja De”
5. Anthropologists keep “bug lists” or “idea wallets”
6. Anthropologists are willing to search for clues in the trash bin

Playing the persona of the Anthropologist is a powerful way to “see” and gather knowledge about the behaviors, effective or ineffective, that are occurring in your school’s Professional Learning Communities. But once you have knowledge to act on, it is time to become a coach.

Steve Roesler, Principal & Founder of The Steve Roesler Group, on his All Things Workplace blog offers great advice on what one can do to become a coach. I have excerpted the entire post because it is excellent advice for coaching Professional Learning Communities.

Do These And You'll Be Coaching

Six Steps to Coaching

1. Stop fixing everyone's stuff.

OK, the next time someone brings you a problem, stop. Do nothing. Then. . .

2. Ask them for more information using open-ended questions.

You already know how to ask questions. (And you may already know the answer to the question. But no one will learn much if they don't learn to think through issues on their own). The trick for "coaching managers" is to click a mental switch that triggers a question instead of an answer. An easy way to develop the questioning habit is to think of yourself as a journalist and start your responses with:

    * Who. . .?

    * What. . .?

    * When. . .?

    * Where. . .?

    * How. . .?

3. Use the bonus question that will automatically buy some time and gather more information: "Tell me more about that?"

4. Listen. (That means "Shut up, don't speak.")

You'll be surprised at how much you'll learn by listening. Once the other person stops talking, give them space to say more. Count silently to 10 if you have to. You'll discover that this block of information will reveal more than the first and often gives them the self-revealing "Aha!" needed. In which case, you'll be a hero.

5. Ask More.

OK, so they didn't get to the heart of the matter in #4. When your person's responses and energy start to fade, that's your cue to ask another open-ended question. Ask it about something they've just told you. Ask anything that will help continue the exploration of the issue. You can't really ask a "wrong" question.

Note. The reason you can't ask a wrong question is this: Your role is to alternate between helping them explore (questions) and being silent (just listen). The act of listening after a question is a gift that few people get. Listening shows respect. When it comes from "the boss" it's an indication of trust in one's ability to problem-solve.

6. Support giving "it" a try. You'll find that the Q&A process will have generated ideas and actions in your person's mind. This is where you help them stretch by suggesting, "Do you want to give that a try and let me know how it's going?"

The “Anthropologist” and the “Coach” are two effective personas and mindsets that can help you make your Professional Learning Communities more effective. David Kelley and Steve Roesler both provide great insight into how we can all make our Professional Learning Communities powerful sources of learning and increasing student achievement.

"Probably my best quality as a coach is that I ask a lot of challenging questions and let the person come up with the answer." Phil Dixon

Three Critical Beliefs of a Professional in a Learning Community

A "Guest Post" from Joel Zehring

Planting and nurturing a healthy professional learning community requires that every teacher (and employee) in a building arrive at three conclusions:

1. I am a professional. My mission is to ensure learning at high levels for every student, measurable by objective evidence.
2. I learn and I help others learn. My students learn more when I collaborate and learn with other teachers, sharing strategies and comparing evidence.
3. My school is a community, greater than the sum of its parts. It is built out of collaborative teams and disciplined professionals that share and learn from their failures and successes.

It’s not enough to adopt two out of the three conclusions. It’s all or nothing.

Because these conclusions aren’t just benign, buzzword statements, adoption can be pretty arduous. Teachers need time and patience to hash through the implications of these terms with other teachers.

Teachers need time to air their concerns, fears, and insecurities before they really assimilate these beliefs.

Teachers need time to struggle and even fight through the process of letting go of longer-standing beliefs that conflict with these conclusions, without feeling like they’re forfeiting their souls and their individuality.

For leaders, the whole process is less like building a tract house, and more like planting and growing a forest. It takes strategy and experience, nurturing and pruning, and time.

The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community: Kaizen and Tenakaizen

Part 3 in a series of posts on Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities

In a previous post “The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community” I shared it is the ability to embrace a duality in their thinking that builds an Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community. To hold two opposing ideas in their minds and reach a creative solution creates an ambidextrous PLC, making them more flexible, innovative, and effective. It is ability and, more importantly, it is an attitude.

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community's thinking can have...
Internal and External Focus
Bias Towards Thinking and Bias Toward Action
Put Teachers First and Put Students First
Focus on Teaching and Focus on Learning
Focus on All Students and Focus on Individual Students
Kaizen and Tenakaizen
High Levels of Teamwork and High Levels of Personal Accountability
We Have the Answers and They Have the Answers
Data Driven and Skeptical of Data
Predictable and Change is Normal

Today I will focus on Kaizen and Tenakaizen

There is a commercial about Tiger Woods that say, “relentless consistency, 50 percent; willingness to change, 50%.” The commercial from the global management consulting firm Accenture sums up perfectly the dual focus of the Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community; relentless consistency while at the same time continuously innovating.

Professional Learning Communities must have a strong unwavering and unyielding commitment to use best practices, research based methods, proven strategies, and all practices that are known to make a difference for student learning. Professional Learning Communities must practice “kaizen”, the continual improvement in their work. A strong Professional Learning Community is always seeking to gain a greater depth of understanding of their work and continual implementation of those best practices. Their internal focus is to find those critical aspects of their work and apply the best-known methods without exception.

PLCs must continue to ask what students need to know, what is the best way for students to demonstrate what they know, use student data in the form of formative and summative common assessments, and re-teaching for those students who have not shown mastery, or provide enrichment for those who have.

The other duality of the Professional Learning Community function is to continually innovate. If “kaizen” is getting better at what they do, the term “tenakaizen” is to make something completely different, to innovate. Author of the book Think Better, Tim Hurson who coined the term tenakaizen explains that, “Tenakaizen is a composite word deriving from ten, meaning ‘law’ or ‘tradition,’ kai, meaning ‘change,’ and zen, meaning ‘good.’”  According to Tim we can interpret the word as meaning, “good revolution” because, “Rather than reproducing the old, it produces the new.”  The Professional Learning Community should be continuously learning to do new things in new ways. The only way to even greater results is to find new innovative ideas.

The “opposable mind” allows a member of a Professional Learning Community to have the, "…predisposition and capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.”

In other words, ambidextrous PLCs have a focus on getting better at what you do, while looking for new ways to do it.Professional Learning Communities that can cope with this duality and manage this con-current focus will prove themselves to be... ambidextrous.

Michael Fullan describes it this way: the “learning is the work.” Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities focus on, “their core goals and tasks with relentless consistency, while at the same time learning continuously how to get better and better a what they are doing.”

“The secret behind ‘learning is the work’ lies in our integration of the precision needed for consistent performance (using what we already know) and the new learning required for continuous improvement.”

Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities continually push themselves to improve and deepen their professional practice and use of proven best practices. Further, Ambidextrous Professional Learning Communities simultaneously look for new and innovative ways to do their work, ways not yet discovered or explored.

"Habitudes" of Professional Learning Communities

I read Angela Maiers’ Change This Manifesto, "Habitudes in the Classroom: Teaching the Habits and Attitudes Our Students Need in the 21st Century". She shares her thoughts on what habits and attitudes (habitudes) students need to be successful in today’s world. I wondered if it is important for students then it must be important for teachers. And if it is important of teachers, it must be important for Professional Learning Communities. So what follows is a mash-up up of Angela’s habitudes with my ideas on Professional Learning Communities.

“The 21st century world needs learners to BE critical, BE creative, and BE strategic.”

“The 21st century world expects learners to HAVE the endurance, fortitude, and courage to brave through each new challenge with confidence and competence.”

Professional Learning Communities are no exception. They are increasing faced with questions of how to exploit the best expertise, talent, and knowledge regardless of geography. They face an ever-increasing desire for real-time feedback, the expectation of immediacy and the compression of time and space. Increasing expectations of accountability combined with increasing transparency in complying with expanding federal, state, and local laws in addition to categorical program monitoring requirements, and labor contracts.

Further, the need for organizations and teams to look outside themselves to expand their network with new members who are sources of learning, creativity, and innovation. And continuous change, choice, and disruption due to the increasing rate of development in the number of choices, options, disruptive ideas & technologies, and new paradigms is a further source of pressure on Professional Learning Communities. Times are changing for Professional Learning Communities. Angela’s ideas offer a core set of “habitudes” for PLC to adopt.

Habitude 1: Imagination
“Imagination is the foundation of all thinking. If we cannot see the possibility, we cannot achieve the outcome. Imagination is our mind’s eye, and has the capacity to jump from present facts to future possibilities. Our capacity to dream, hope, and plan for the future is influenced and impacted by the control and understanding of imagination’s remarkable power.”

What Professional Learning Community shouldn’t be imaginative?  The imagined outcome of student achievement, student learning, student success, should be a key driver of PLCs.

Habitude 2: Curiosity
“Champion learners are curious about everything.”

“Questions like ‘what if’ and ‘I wonder’ keep us in motion. Curious brains are active brains, and active brains become smart brains.”

Great results begin with great questions. Professional Learning Communities should develop the skill of questioning and the ability to conduct cycles of inquiry into student learning. All PLC should be curios to what students are learning, how they are learning, and what get in the way of the learning.

Habitude 3: Perseverance
“Perseverance is the cornerstone of any successful endeavor, in school and out. It is a key to victory over unfavorable circumstances.”

The work of a Professional Learning Community is not easy. It takes perseverance.

“It’s the ‘no-matter-what’ part of the habitude where difficulty lies.”

“Real perseverance happens when we do it anyways, in spite of opposition.”

“…struggle is the welcome mat to the door of breakthrough.”

Professional Learning Communities must be committed to the struggle. There are plenty of barriers and obstacles. No matter, PLCs must collaborate, co-create, innovate, and ideate around these barriers, obstacles, and cultural opposition. The students are depending on that level of perseverance.

Habitude 4: Self-Awareness
“We all have strengths and weaknesses in regard to our learning performance and capabilities.”

“Self-awareness is the ability to simultaneously exist both inside and outside or ourselves.”

Self-Awareness is a powerful concept for Professional Learning Communities. I define awareness for PLCs here as the ability to or knowledge of…
Ambidextrous Thinking
Wisdom Stewardship
Abilities
Response-ability
Network
Experiences
Skills
Scalability

Habitude 5: Courage
“Courageous learners understand that safe is risky. Success is the byproduct of taking risks.”

Professional Learning Communities must have the courage to overcome barriers to collaboration such as…
The Hoarding Barrier
The Not-Invented-Here Barrier
The Search Barrier
The Transfer Barrier
Information Cascade
The Three Sins of Teamwork

“When students become accustomed to asking each other for reasons and opinions, to listen carefully to one another, to build on another’s idea, they demonstrate courage.”

It takes risk. It takes courage. Professional Learning Communities must display both if our students are to succeed.

Habitude 6: Adaptability
“Adaptability is more than just serving change; it is using change as a growth opportunity. In fact, with anticipation of change, you can control change.”

“Simple put, in our world, there is only one constant: Change.”

Professional Learning Communities should operate as a CiNO. A Change is Normal Organization. They should be built to change, adapt, modify, and adjust. That is what learners do and that is what is at the heart of a PLC. The learning is the work. That means change is normal.


Angela says, “We are the CLO’s, Chief Learning Officers, of our classrooms. We must be the learner we wish students to become. As living, breathing exemplars of the Habitudes in action, we model passionate curiosity, imagination adaptability, and persevere out loud and in front of our students.”

Shouldn’t our Professional Learning Communities demonstrate the sort of professionalism, learning, and community that our student will be expected to display when they leave the classroom? Shouldn’t our Professional Learning Communities display these “Habitudes?”

The answer is yes.