School Change Collaborative

Members of the School Change Collaborative recommended the following readings to begin our discussions on the topic of building a learning community. Group members also wrote the brief reviews of each reading.

Anderson, G.; Herr, K.; and Nihlen, A. (1994). Studying Your Own School: An Educator's Guide to Qualitative Practitioner Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Chapter 1, "What is Practitioner Research?," a good, short (8-page) overview of history and approaches. Other chapters include examples and research approaches. I quote here the brief conclusion to chapter 1.

"These are exciting times for practitioner research. It has the potential to bring to light important theories about practice that have been too long discredited as informal theory or "teacher lore." It can empower school practitioners by helping them discover their voices and resist attempts at deskilling. It can build collegiality and a common community of learning among practitioners, which in turn provides a model of inquiry for students. On the other hand, it can also become one more teacher in-service scheme that can be packaged and taken on the road; another implementation strategy cooked up by management to "build ownership" in schools for the latest centrally mandated reform. It can become just one more expectation-- one more thing teachers are expected to do."

Argyris, C. (1991). "Teaching Smart People How to Learn" in The Learning Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Improvement, edited by Robert Howard, Harvard Business Review, pages 177-194.

This article starts with the premise that the definition of learning is not just the ability to problem solve. Learning also has to include the capacity to look inward and to reflect critically on personal behavior. When you reflect on your own behavior you move from single loop to double loop learning. One of the author's points that made a lot of sense to me was the need to spend more time focusing on failure and learning from it. The article cuts pretty close to home for me in its description of how professionals avoid learning and how successful people use defensive reasoning and sink into a "doom loop." These refer to mechanisms people use to protect themselves from deeper learning. The author argues we need to see the inconsistencies between the theories we hold and the way we act.

Beckhard, Richard, and Pritchard, Wendy. (1992). Changing the Essence. San Francisco: Josey-Bass. (recommend Chapter 2 on "Creating a Learning Organization: Balanced Rewards for Results and Improvement," pp. 9-25).

More of an OD book (by a leader in the field), but a nice synopsis of the principles of learning organizations/learning communities. Some important points (that I often don't see discussed enough) are the importance of creating rewards and incentives that encourage people to follow norms of learning and question asking, and providing feedback loops and an information system so that learning can take place (learning will only occur if people have access to data and information; you don't learn much in a vacuum). This is not a deep chapter but a nice overview with some useful bulleted lists of learning community characteristics.

Bennett, Joan Kremer, and O'Brien, Michael J. (June 1994) "The Building Blocks of the Learning Organization," Training, 41-48.

Rapidly evolving technology, diminishing natural resources, increasing global competition, a more diverse work force require organizations to learn more and learn it faster to remain competitive. Creative tension between current reality and desired future provides the fuel that moves an organization forward. Kremer and O'Brien studied 25 successful companies that met two criteria, (1) they had announced a commitment to becoming a learning organization and (2) they had demonstrated commitment by adopting practices that foster organizational learning. The companies could point to measurable benefits as a result. The authors examined the practices of the companies that enabled them to apply the principles of organizational learning. From the examination, the authors compiled a list of 200 practices, distilled the list to 100, and then boiled the practices down to 12 fundamental factors -- building blocks -- that supply the action behind the rhetoric of perpetual learning. The 12 factors include strategy/vision, executive practices, managerial practices, climate, organization/job structure, information flow, individual and team practices, work processes, performance goals/feedback, training/education, individual/team development, and rewards/recognition. The final point in the article is that each company must forge its own unique path and continuously invent new ways to be learning organizations. Dialogue within the organization is the key.

This article is important because it gives one version of targets, key aspects of learning organizations as the basis for self-examination. As I read the article, I automatically began to ask myself, how does this apply to school/district/community systems? How does our own company stack up? There is a set of questions and/or direct description about each of the factors. The article is rich with examples from the 25 companies. This article started the juices flowing regarding relationships between business and schooling, organizations and systems.

Block, Peter. (1993). Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Block suggests that real workplace change has been limited to a small portion of our workforce. To replace the traditional management tools of command and control, organizations must offer partnership and choice at all levels to their employees as well as to their customers. Such reform in the workplace is our best hope to enable democracy to thrive in our organizations, our spiritual and ethical values to be lived out, and economic success to be sustained.

Bolman, Lee G., and Deal, Terrence E. (1995). Leading With Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.

This parable focuses on the search of a dispirited leader in search of something more satisfying than a preoccupation with the bottom line. In his conversations with Maria, a "seasoned," wise, and successful businesswoman, he rediscovers his own soul and learns how to ignite the spirit of his organization.

Boyd, Victoria. (1992) School Context: Bridge or Barrier to Change? Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Boyd, Victoria. (1992). "Creating a Context for Change." Issues . . .about Change. 2(2). Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Boyd, Victoria. (1994). "Schools as Learning Communities." Issues . . .about Change. 4(1). Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

Brown, Ann L. (November 1994). "The Advancement of Learning." Educational Researcher, 23(8), 4-12.

This challenging article reflects on instruction and the need for appropriate theories of learning and development. Children, as active constructors of knowledge, become the focus of the author's work in developing environments where classrooms are a community of learners.

Byham, W. C., and Cox, J. (1988). Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment. Ballentime Books.
(a short, entertaining book).

The book reads as a fairy tale in a modern day organization. For anyone who has worked in a modern bureaucratic organization (like an REL or a school district) it sure rings true! The book gets at the ideas of empowering employees to become learners and problem solvers rather than management by control and coercion. I read this once on a long airplane ride. It's a fast read and a fun, light-hearted book, yet it has some solid underlying concepts about creating participative, learning-oriented organizations or communities. I recommend it if you are getting tired of the usual academic treatises on the topic.

Darling-Hammond. L. (Ed.). (1994). Professional Development Schools: Schools for Developing a Profession. New York: Teachers College Press.

This book is a series of case descriptions of individual schools. As a believer in case methods, I think talking about one of these cases could help us get more concrete and specific about what we mean (and it's cheaper than site visits). I copied chapter 2 on Wells Junior High School, part of the Southern Maine Partnership.

Estes, Nolan. (1994). "Learning and Caring." Executive Educator, 16(1), 28-30 (short article).

A call for a "high performance learning community" that ensures children's physical, emotional, and academic well-being. A model of the school that is based in the community, centered on the individual learner, and offers a world-class curriculum. It is a short descriptive article that paints a picture of what such a "school" might look like. The ideas come from a collaborative project (involving GTE, nine school systems in Dallas-Fort Worth, and higher education) to design a "break the mold" school. This view of hplc places emphasis on the ideas of integrated services for children/families and high academic standards ("world class academics"). It seems like a nice complement to the view of "learning communities" that focuses heavily on teachers' professional work.

Hargreaves, Andy. (Summer 1996). "Transfoming Knowledge: Blurring the Boundaries Between Research, Policy, and Practice." Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 18(2), 105-122.

Knowledge creation and knowledge utilization is the subject of this paper. University-based research knowledge and teacher classroom-based knowledge and the usefulness of each is explored. Blurring the boundaries of these two "camps" is the theme.

Hord, S.M., and Boyd, V. (Winter 1995). "Staff Development Fuels a Culture of Continuous Improvement." Journal of Staff Development, 16(1), 10-15.

A school staff that is organizationally arranged as a professional learning community is described. The types of professional development (analyzed vis-à-vis the models proposed by Dennis Sparks and Susan Loucks-Horsley) are reported to suggest how staff learning can support a continuous focus on improvement.

Janov, Jill E. (May 1995). "Creating Meaning: The Heart of Learning Communities." Training & Development, 49(5), 53-58.

Creating meaning, both individually and communally, is the focus of this article. The pervasive role that assumptions play in guiding our meaning-making is explored within the context of the author's work with a large group of community leaders, who became a learning community.

Kofman, Fred, and Senge, Peter. (Autumn 1993). "Communities of Commitment: The Heart of Learning Organizations." Organizational Dynamics, 22(2).

For me, this article articulated some of the reasons why the concept of learning community is so compelling. Perhaps I can give you a flavor for this article by quoting its underlying tenets. The argument for fostering learning communities is summarized in a quote from Deming: "Nothing happens without personal transformation and the only safe space to allow this transformation is a learning community." These communities are described as being one of the forces that enable us to address three major (and deep rooted) institutional dysfunctions: fragmentation, competition and reactiveness. The article provides some examples of how each of these is contrary to our human nature. Then it addresses the issue of leadership and the way that the great leader myth has disabled individuals by emphasizing personal powerlessness. The long term result is that we are not so quick to act. In a learning community, leadership by one powerful person is replaced by community building, practical experimentation and testing of theories. Every time I reread this article and apply it to schools, I find it very thought provoking!

Lambert, L.; Walker, D.; Zimmerman, D. P.; Cooper, J. E.; Lambert, M. D.; Gardner, M. E.; and Slack, P. J. F. (1995). The Constructivist Leader. New York: Teachers College Press.

This is a really rich book that I can recommend even before I've digested it, but I don't yet know what part to pull out or how to summarize it's relevance. I sent a chapter that would add a couple perspectives, one on "the school district as interdependent learning community."

Louis, Karen Seashore; Kruse, Sharon D.; and Associates. (1995). Professionalism and Community: Perspectives on Reforming Urban Schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
This book has case studies of five schools that are in varying stages of developing professionalism and community. Chapters 8 and 9 analyze and summarize, compare, etc. across the cases.

Newmann, Fred M., and Wehlage, Gary G. (1995). Successful School Restructuring. Madison, WI: Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This 53-page monograph (excluding appendices, etc.) reports the results of research conducted by the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools. Four major research studies (including survey and case studies) comprise the data base and respond to the question: How can the tools of restructuring be used to elevate learning for all students? The results provide insights and encouragement for increasing school effectiveness.

Owen, Jill; Cox, Pat; and Watkins, John. (1994). Genuine Rewards: Community Inquiry into Connecting Learning, Teaching and Assessing. Andover, MA: The Regional Laboratory for Educational Improvement of the Northeast and the Islands.

This book has special meaning to me because I have heard the authors speak so passionately about their experiences working with learning communities in schools. I particularly recommend Chapter 2 which does a nice job talking about learning in a straightforward way. This discussion is supplemented with a group activity on powerful learning experiences, described in the appendix. This book is designed for educators and gives plenty of examples of the conversations schools have when they try to align learning and assessment. I think the materials in the book would be most relevant when consulting with a school that is trying to transform itself into a learning community.

Peterson, R. (1992). Life in a Crowded Place: Making a Learning Community. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

This book focuses on the elements of a supportive culture and how community is created and sustained. It's assumed underlying approach to teaching is in the whole language tradition but it's purpose is not to explicate specific instructional strategies. Instead it has sections on ceremony, ritual, celebration, conversation, residency, etc. I particularly like the chapters on modes of discourse within a section on "making sense of experience." I sent a copy of the chapter on "Dialogue: Uniting Critique and Inquiry."

Prawat, Richard S. (April 1992). "From Individual Differences to Learning Communities -- Our Changing Focus." Educational Leadership.

This article describes the theories that have and are driving schooling and reform in schooling from the turn of the century. Beginning with an emphasis on the individual with beliefs that learning was a private process of individual discovery, proceeding through the theories of cognitive psychologists and anthropologists, the article ends with a description of teachers as community builders. The article points up that the classroom is only one of many arrangements for effective learning.

The article is important because it traces the history of theories of schooling/learning and portrays their influence on the practice of teaching and schooling. It helped me gain additional understandings about why school is what it is and the differences between independent, individual focused approaches and social, group learning processes. For me it helped connect teaching and learning in school to learning communities anywhere.

Sadow, D., and Rhodes, L. (Summer 1996). "The Wizard's Curtain: A Reply from Oregon." Human Resource Development Quarterly, 7(2), 185-192.

This is an article that I just received after attending a discussion on Margaret Wheatley's work led by Dennis Sadow, the article's author. The article begins with the recognition that "no systematic analysis has been undertaken to identify the attributes of the learning organization" and then goes on to offer ideas about ways to research communities or networks. The authors warns that academic researchers may bring so much of their world view to their research that they may not be able to detect the essence of what happens in communities. The point that struck me was the argument that learning communities are not mechanistic or structural objects and so many of our research models may not apply. If we see that learning communities are living systems we might see they need to be studied as they evolve and react. The authors recommend using a form of action research and participating in the formation of a community to capture a richer picture of how learning communities work. They also warn researchers about trying to pick apart a learning community to understand it after it is formed. I heard more about the authors' research at the presentation (only a bit is described in the article) and it was intriguing. After doing their work, the authors can give some very detailed information about what happens when researchers take a reductionist point of view and study a fragmented and controlled human system by taking a sample at a point in time.

By the way the curtain in the article's title refers to the curtain that Toto pulls back in the Wizard of Oz. (we are great Wizard of Oz fans in our family, having read more than 30 of the Oz books.) The argument here is that if you only look at the learning community's wizardly tricks, you might believe these communities are so powerful they can solve all sorts of problems but to really know what these communities do you have to pull back the curtain and watch the community do the work. The context in this work is the electronics industry so it is a little harder to see its application in the kind of work we do but I always have new insights when I try to make connections across fields.

Schon, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books (whole book good; I don't have a copy anymore so can't recommend a specific chapter).

I like to think of this as a classic instead of a "moldy oldy." It is over a dozen years old now but talks in depth about the inquiry process that is part of a professional community of learners. Schon develops the idea of "reflection in action" (i.e., learning while doing) and the importance of "problem setting" (i.e., asking the right questions and making sure a collaborative learning team fully understands "the problem" before it jumps to solutions). He also talks about how the organizational context can encourage or discourage reflection-in-action. Another little gem is something he calls "double vision" -- the ability to adopt a view or explanation of something, but always keeping alive other alternatives so that the group does not see its solution as the last word but as part of an ongoing reflective conversation. This leads to a learning community that is always open to new ideas (i.e., continuous improvement).

Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday.
(whole book good, but would especially recommend Chapter 10 on Mental Models as a short reading).

Many or all of us are familiar with Senge's work which although not original, pulls together many important ideas about learning organizations or communities. An important chapter is Chapter 10 on Mental Models. The idea here is that a successful learning community doesn't just share a vision, but also looks at and tries to reach agreement on deeper beliefs and assumptions of how things work and about human nature. For example, a school serving at-risk students must have more than a shared vision that "all students can learn" (its espoused values). A true school learning community must examine, expose, and discuss more basic assumptions and beliefs about children in at-risk situations (its values-in-use) that affect everyday staff behavior. In schools, these deeper beliefs often run counter to the espoused values (e.g., beliefs that students who come from high poverty backgrounds can never be exceptional learners because they lack ability, motivation, or a good home).

Senge, Peter. (Fall 1990). "The Leader's New Work: Building Learning Organizations." Sloan Management Review, 7-23

This is a retelling of some of Senge's premises but in a shorter form. Other have recommended reading "The Fifth Discipline" section on Mental Models and this covers some of the same territory, starting in this article on page 14. Senge uses slightly different language to talk about the same concerns that are voiced by Chris Argyris (above). Here, Senge points to the need to see "leaps of abstraction" and to balance "inquiry and advocacy." I particularly valued the ideas on page 19 on ways to surface the assumptions that influence our interactions. I have seen some of this discussion take place among a community of math educators and it sure seemed that a lot of learning was taking place.

Sergiovanni, T. J. (1996). Leadership for the School House. San Francisco: Josey Bass.

I've honestly only skimmed this book, but liked what I read.

Sergiovanni, T.J. (May 1994). "Organizations or Communities? Changing the Metaphor Changes the Theory." Educational Administration Quarterly, 30(2), 214-226.

The assumptions of "organizations" (one means by which to group people) center on legitimacy, hierarchy, and self-interest. "Communities" are collections of people that differ significantly from organizations. The author makes this distinction and addresses the implications for the relationships of students, staff, and parents. In communities, authority and leadership would also shift, as the sources of authority for leadership are embedded in shared ideas.

Steffy, B. E.; and Lindle, J.C. (1994). Building Coalitions: How to Link TQE School with Government, Business and Community. Corwin Press.

This book does a great job showing how to apply the concepts of TQM to the world of schools and in the process provides some enriched insights about learning communities (in the sense of educators reaching out to the entire community) There is an excellent chart of Deming's 14 points and their application to schools in the preface; the chart describes how application of Deming's work can increase stakeholder involvement in the learning community of schools. Each chapter has some concrete advice, blended with some questions that really address the issue of schools as places that can promote lifelong learning. The book expands upon a lot of ideas that NWREL has tried to work into our consulting with schools. For example, the book asks some challenging questions about how much outreach educators have made to include the school's primary clientele (students and parents) as part of its learning community. There is also a section on learning communities collecting data and making decisions based upon that data.

Wasser, Judith D., and Bresler, L. (June/July 1996). "Working in the Interpretive Zone: Conceptualizing Collaboration in Qualitative Research Teams." Educational Researcher, 25(5), 5-15.

The authors report about the activities and "meaning" derived from the work of a collaborative of qualitative researchers. It is no stretch to suggest that this group became an intense/deeply developed learning community during the course of their experiences with each other.