Fostering a Professional Learning Community:

leadership for change

By John Hellner

Each education site harbours unique leadership, personnel, financial and situational
contexts. Nevertheless, certain leadership behaviours and practices emerge as conducive
to the establishment and maintenance of a Professional Learning Community (PLC):
identifying leadership; leading from the centre; managing conflict; supporting classroom
teachers; modeling; and action research.

Identify organisational leaders

In a collaborative culture, school leaderships ability to recognize leadership in others

proves supportive of a PLC. Teacher leaders share a vision based on excellent teaching.
They possess an ideology based on pursuit of improvement. They dont try to control the
behaviour of peers: they prove best equipped to become leader in learning communities.
The teacher leaders can provide the support and critical mass of teachers the leader needs
to pursue and sustain a PLC. School leaders should recognise the need to win the hearts
and minds of satisfactory teachers in the middle: perhaps up to forty percent of the staff
need winning over if the school is to become a PLC. Enlisting the support of faculty
leaders, without singling them out, can provide the impetus needed for a school to reach a
tipping point, in which belief in a collaborative culture is generally accepted.

Lead from the centre

School leaders should lead from the centre, if they envision and advocate a collaborative
culture. Leading from the centre translates to accessibility; giving up expected leadership
behaviours, such as making all decisions, proposing all new ideas and sole clarification of
a vision; and, taking every opportunity to stimulate conversation about teaching and
learning. From the leaders position, multiple small actions, daily events, comments and

PLC Hellner 1
asides can all donate to the tiny shifts in the organisations culture that becomes a much
larger change given time.

Some other considerations resonating with the notion of leading from the centre might
be: working with people, not on them; start where people are and not where the
leadership is; maintaining a sensitivity to the differences and fears of teachers;
encouraging trial an error and being prepared to rework issues and find new learning and
understanding in the process.

Manage Conflict

Inherent in the operation of a PLC based on democratic inclusively and leadership from
the centre will be members questioning and challenging the values and activities of the
PLC. Such reflection breeds not only innovation, but can also lead to conflict.
Leadership should recognise and manage the conflict in order to reap the rewards of the
creativity generated by dissent and discussion.

Support Classroom Teachers

Improving classroom practice and ultimately student outcomes lay at the heart of the
PLC. In support of this vital ingredient and as recognition of the complexity and craft
nature of teachers work, the leadership of a PLC should attend to systemic structures in
support of the classroom teacher. The most obvious support translates into providing
teachers time to share practice: to meet and talk; to increase interdependent teaching
roles; to improve communications; to release teachers for training, mentoring and
observing built into the structure of the school day and yearly calendar. Assisting and
providing expertise to enable teachers to improve classroom practice enhances teachers
senses of efficacy and helps develop and maintain a PLC. Flowing on, as a by product,
sharing practice supports teachers, gives assistance, and develops trust.

PLC Hellner 2
On another level, supportive systemic structures can provide time, resources and
conditions for teamwork opportunities to focus on educational principles; for reflection
on faculty identified issues; and relaxed, open channels of communication. In the process
and as a consequence of such systemic provisions, the school becomes more democratic
an inherent fundamental of a PLC.

Also in support of classroom practice, leaders in PLCs promote a culture of high

intellectual quality. They take responsibility for introducing new ideas and people to
encourage teachers to reflect on their teaching practice and to develop increased skills.
New ideas and people could imply school based initiatives, outside consultancy,
employing new staff and rotational positions of responsibility within the school in order
to encourage a cross fertilisation of ideas.

Modeling walk the talk

PLCs leaders should be exemplary models. One school leader said, what you believe is
contagious. Indeed, to walk the talk is no mere slogan. A leader who walks the talk
transmits a positive and motivating effect on colleagues. The notion of principal
omnipotence and omnicompetence should be discarded in favour of principals
participation in the PLC and professional development. Administrators participation can
do much to establish the climate or culture of a school and ensure the school is a true
learning community.

Other supportive practices

Links with current research and awareness of current best effective practice develops
informed professionalism. More specifically, school leadership can assist the
development and sustaining of a PLC with the formation of study groups to examine
educational issues, both real school based problems and theoretical topics. Partnering the
school with a teacher education provider, encouraging staff to attend conferences,
developing and maintaining a serious professional library, seeking out staff exchange

PLC Hellner 3
programmes, and supporting sabbatical and study leave opportunities, can simultaneously
serve as resources for study groups, as well as giving impetus to teacher reflection and
growth.

Sharing information, debating and discussing ideas, collaborating to build purpose, and
inclusivity rank as hallmarks of the PLC. It follows that staff professional deliberations
have access to appropriate forums, in which to share emergent findings and experiences:
staff meeting, staff days, workshops, notice boards, intranet, video clips, journals,
newsletters, and discussion documents. It also follows that staff deliberations, if justified,
can become school policy.

Action Research

Some academics place special emphasis on the role of action research as appealing to
practitioners in the field seeking to institute individual self improvement or school wide
reform. They campaign for action research as an important preliminary to building
communities of learners, and, as a link between research and practice. Action research
can be seen as spawning a culture supportive of lifelong learning. Many of the practices
outlined above would provide the time and resources; leadership could cultivate the
possibilities.

Leaders of leaders

Perhaps the biggest component of a change leadership style remains the most
imponderable. If we accept it is the leaders obligation to develop teachers leadership
qualities, we might need to charge them with the responsibility for fostering an attitudinal
shift in their staff. If notions of teacher leadership are to become embedded, principals
will need to become leaders of leaders, generated by a sustained nurturing of staff
empowerment and encouragement of teachers to become leaders and not leave decision
making to the top corridor.

PLC Hellner 4
Such a leadership style conveys broad overtones of collective leadership, in which
teachers develop expertise by working together, leadership residing not solely in the
individual at the top and a distribution among formal and informal leaders. Such a
leaders style might be characterised by using listening, gathering information,
consultating, facilitating, persuading and negotiating, in order to both influence, as well
as to be influenced.

It remains contestable whether attitude can be taught. It may be that attitude can best be
caught. It may be that modelling a proactive attitude on the part of school leaders
leading by example can create other leaders in the school: leadership breeding
leadership. If that is the case, leaders can use the communicable aspect of attitude to
construct the environment, to set the tone, to establish the relationships necessary for an
emerging PLC.

PLC Hellner 5