Professional Learning Communities: Building Blocks for School Culture and Student Learning

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Collective Practice, Quality Teaching: VUE Number 27, Spring 2010

Professional learning communities that center on students, use data effectively, 
distribute expertise, and enjoy district-level leadership and investment are proving to have a powerful impact on school culture, instructional quality, and student outcomes.

Professional learning communities (PLCs) have gained increasing attention from researchers over the last twenty years or so and have been present in schools for even longer. While in the past, they were often seen as a “boutique” exercise rather than part of a larger reform, PLCs are gaining increasing traction and notice in various settings and in a number of school districts as a way of improving teaching quality and student achievement.

Milbrey McLaughlin and Joan Talbert have been studying professional learning communities together and separately for many years. Their most recent joint book on the subject is Building School-Based Teacher Learning Communities (McLaughlin & Talbert 2006). They spoke with VUE guest editor Marla Ucelli-Kashyap about the evolution of and evidence about PLCs.

What is an effective professional learning community? What are their characteristics and what do you think of the state 
of evidence that they can really make a 
difference for student outcomes?

JOAN TALBERT: You can use all sorts of different language around this – community of practIce, collaborative practice, PLC – but it is a group of individuals who share a goal and work together to achieve the goal, assess their progress, make corrections, and hold themselves accountable for achieving their common goal. Typically, people think of teachers in learning communities. But [PLCs] can be principals across schools in a district. Central office can function as a professional learning community. And, of course, [PLCs can be] teachers in grade-level teams in elementary schools – or in high school subject departments, or cross-discipline teams working with the same set of students. Such groups are PLCs to the extent that they are doing joint work together and have norms of collaboration and mutual accountability.

MILBREY MCLAUGHLIN: I would add to that: very clear norms of openness and candor and learning from failure, so the cultural shift is actually quite profound for educators. Learning communities also are characterized by a lot of information and data in doing joint work that is supported by an internal system of accountability. I think one of the things that struck us in looking at PLCs across a number of initiatives is there is a point where the accountability for student outcomes is pulled into the community – as opposed to having someone doing it to you. So, even 
in a high-stakes accountability context, we find that internal sense of professional responsibility.

The Impact of Professional Learning Communities on Student Achievement

When you looked at professional learning communities that had the kind of norms that you have just been talking about 
and the ability to learn from failure, what is their impact?

MILBREY MCLAUGHLIN: Well, Joan, you are sitting on a pile of data right now.

JOAN TALBERT: Yes. The most up-close kind of evidence that we see all the time is that a group of teachers is looking closely at their students’ learning outcomes and skill gaps and figuring out ways to work together to address the gaps and come back and see 
how the students did. Key is designing an intervention for addressing the student learning needs – then assessing the results and then coming back and either trying something new or moving on. So, to document outcomes of the PLC you can look at data the teachers develop to assess the students’ learning of the particular things that they have attended to.

In addition, we and others have done correlational analyses where we look across teacher groups or across schools at the extent of “PLCness” to see if that predicts gains in student achievement. We found, repeatedly, strong effects of teacher collaboration on gains in student learning at the school level and in smaller groups. 
A group called Pearson Achievement Solutions has been doing a fairly extensive analysis of student outcomes related to their model of developing grade-level learning teams.¹ They have some pretty impressive evidence of student learning gains in a kind of interrupted time series analysis. You can see the shift in the growth of student achievement after the learning teamwork begins and in relation to comparison schools within the district as a whole. I think evidence is beginning to accumulate of strong student outcomes – but the problem of developing the PLCs is the challenge.

MILBREY MCLAUGHLIN: Wouldn’t you also say that where the student effects are most evident is at the bottom of the distribution, since a lot of these communities spend their time working around questions of student failure or poor achievement? I am thinking of the SAM [Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model]/New Visions schools in New York City.

JOAN TALBERT: Yes, [there is an] increase of students being on track that we have been seeing among schools doing a particular kind of PLC initiative we have been evaluating in New York City. The veteran schools in SAM have a significantly better rate of bringing students from being off track to being on track to graduate compared to schools that have not been involved with SAM.²

Are there any fine points, in terms of implementation or results, around the effectiveness of professional learning communities in changing school culture and teaching practices that are related to particular characteristics, like grade level or racial and ethnic composition of the teaching staff?

JOAN TALBERT: There is not really hard evidence on composition. One thing that we’ve argued and I think we have evidence to support – though it’s not published at this point – is that there has to be some sort of critical mass of experienced, skilled teachers in the group. Maybe it is only one out of three teachers or something like that ratio in a larger group who have strong instructional skills.

We often find, in the poorest schools with high teacher turnover and where grade-level teams are organized to try and bring people together for planning time, that brand-new teachers forming a team are struggling with rudiments of instruction. And they just don’t have the knowledge resources amongst them to effectively collaborate to improve student achievement. So this is a question of whether the group has sufficient teacher experience and expertise to learn together and make good decisions about interventions to improve student learning.