Developing and Sustaining a Collaborative Learning Culture

As a follow to the June 2019 discussion, when endeavoring to develop and sustain a learning culture, effective leaders must mitigate learning overload.  The following discussion seeks to provide strategic protocols for promoting collaborative teams.  These include a professional learning community, which can reduce stress and fear while optimizing organizational learning. 

An effective school collaboratively reaches consensus on the mission, core values, and beliefs (Lezotte & Snyder, 2011).  Thereafter, collective inquiry is effective for building shared knowledge.  This process, “in turn, allows them to make more informed (and therefore better) decisions, and increases the likelihood they will arrive at consensus” (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker,  2008, p. 17).  Given the identified benefits of a collaborative professional learning community (PLC), Dufour et al were “convinced educators would benefit from both greater clarity regarding the PLC concept and specific strategies for implementing the concept” (p. 15).

Effective communication promotes collaboration, thereby optimizing the learning organization’s ability to reach consensus.  Schmoker (1999) posits teams outperform individual efforts, therefore, "learning not only occurs in teams but endures" (p. 12).  An effective learning organization utilizes the following three beliefs to optimize teams and the PLC concept:

1.   the team believes strongly in each member's capacity to develop practical solutions to everyday teaching and learning problems;

2.  there is a belief that regardless of a school's social or economic circumstances, improvement can and will occur;

3.     the team arrives at each meeting anticipating that informed trial and error will inevitably lead to better teaching and hence to higher learning (Schmoker, 1999, p.20).

Utilizing six elements of an effective PLC helps educators benefit in a number of ways from working together.  These include developing a clear, shared vision.  This element optimizes the group’s ability to develop a collaborative culture focusing on learning, engage in collective inquiry, remain action oriented, commit to continuous improvement, and adjust further based on results (Dufour et al., 2008).  Thus, the six elements of an effective PLC promote learning by doing.  As with many processes developed for sustaining success, the six elements work most effectively when treated as an interdependent, cyclical process. 

To be successful, the PLC requires “reculturing the traditional culture of schools and districts” (Dufour et al., 2008, p. 6).  Crucially, the shift needs to be cultural and not merely structural, thereby embedding sustained improvements in “the assumptions, beliefs, values, expectations, and habits that constitute the norm for that organization” (p. 90).  A skillful educational leader begins developing an effective collaborative culture by understanding the improvement process rather than merely the systemic change process.  A skillful educational leader and empowered educators trust in established and agreed upon non-negotiable goals (NNGs) and values while embracing both school-based and teacher autonomy. 

An instructional leader can create a defined learning culture to optimize structured organizational learning by utilizing strategies that encourage high levels of effectiveness.  The first pursuit in this endeavor is to mitigate learning overload.  Learning overload prevents effective educational leaders from realizing progress and achievement of stated goals (Reason, 2010).  Citing Kennedy (2006) and Franklin (2005), Reason (2010) notes, “We can’t alter the brain to hold more information, but we can change our approach to learning in ways that reduce overwhelm and prepare us to deal with institutional challenges more effectively” (p. 99).  Every stakeholder’s reticular activating system (RAS) impacts his or her attention and motivation.  Therefore, the RAS influences how efficiently staff addresses the organizational focal points.  The effective leader recognizes this and seeks to “clearly identify the learning focal points that matter” (p. 100) as a way to mitigate stressors that overwhelms one’s perception and attention to organizational focal points. 

Learning organizations attend to what Vygotsky called scientific concepts (Tudge & Scrimsher, 2003).  Scientific concepts are psychological tools such as language, formulas, memory techniques, concepts, rules, symbols, and signs.  Properly designed class instruction utilizes and learns through these psychological tools, which reduces learning overload by optimizing metacognition (Bohlin et al., 2008)

In the pursuit of defining a learning culture, effective leaders also seek to optimize structured organizational learning by utilizing a system proven effective for promoting change.  The following eight-step protocol (Reason, 2010), promotes success while reducing learning overload:

Step One: Acknowledging Learning Limits

Step Two: Lightening the Learning Load

Step Three: Identifying Learning Focal Points

Step Four: Establishing Emotional Relevance

Step Five: Establishing Inquiry

Step Six: Identifying Essential Goals and Outcomes

Step Seven: Making the Focal Points Public

Step Eight: Funneling New Ideas Into Current Focal Points (pp. 103-112)

Reason (2010) posits, “The identification of learning focal points, empowering questions, and must-have outcomes won’t reduce all the confusion in an organization” (p. 112).  However, the eight-step protocol noted above optimizes the learning organization’s ability to prioritize elements essential for promoting student learning and sustaining reform.  Clarity and focus mitigates fear and stress, thereby improving the organization’s culture of learning while reducing learning overload. 

The improvement to the collaborative culture begins with recognizing promotion of student learning in schools that are loosely coupled by design requires a tightly coupled system in relation to the established non-negotiable goals (NNGs).  Beginning with district leadership, a culture based on “defined autonomy” (Marzano & Waters, 2010, p. 8) communicates NNGs to both the internal and external stakeholders.  Otherwise, change can be either slow or nonexistent.

An effective educational leader confidently handles more autonomy or increased degrees of freedom.  By contrast, novice principals or leaders at struggling schools need more guidance and direction from district-level leaders.  An effective leader recognizes when and how staff can work autonomously and collaboratively, thereby developing or removing staff as necessary and promoting a culture of high expectations within the school (Eck & Goodwin, 2010).

Purpose driven inquiry (Reason, 2010) can be utilized with either small groups or the entire school community.  Reason presented a six-step protocol useful for small and systemic projects alike:

Step One: Identifying the Question and Knowing Why We Ask It

Step Two: Igniting Collective Curiosity

Step Three: Defining Strategic Action

Step Four: Defining Accountability

Step Five: Making the Agenda Public

Step Six: Maintaining Engagement (pp. 78-86)

Establishment of non-negotiable goals (NNGs) are a product of earlier collaboration, which promoted staff empowerment.  Determination to collaborate, time to meet, willingness to ask serious questions, creating an action plan, and always meeting with an agenda, promotes communication aligned to those established NNGs.  Therefore, Reason’s (2010) six-step protocol for purpose driven inquiry mitigates learning overload while encouraging communication directed at sustained improvement and organizational learning. 

Effective accountability requirements hastened the emergence of professional learning communities (PLC).  Marzano and Waters (2009) believe, a PLC “suggests a group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning oriented, growth-promoting way; operating as a collective enterprise” (p. 56).  The PLC and any potential action research must address the need to develop and sustain a systemic culture of continuous improvement that promotes learning (DuFour, et al, 2008). 

Positive change needs new thinking, willingness, humility, collaboration, and a collective vision grounded in a clear mission.  Unintended consequences, which often fall into the pool labeled “negative change,” typically ignore those characteristics connected with positive change.  Ideally, this discussion successfully emphasized it is not enough to want to change or need to change, for to effectively change, an organization must experience positive change.

To Cite:

Anderson, C.J. (July 30, 2019) Developing and sustaining a collaborative learning culture.

              [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.ucan-cja.blogspot.com/

References

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