May 2004 | Volume 61 | Number 8

Schools as Learning Communities

Connected at the Roots

Marge Scherer

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What Is a Professional Learning Community?

Richard DuFour

The author points out that the concept of the professional learning community, although currently in vogue, is not widely understood. He discusses three principles of true professional learning communities: a commitment to ensuring that students learn, a culture of collaboration, and a focus on results. Only if school staff members do the hard work necessary to implement these principles, he writes, will their school become an effective professional learning community.

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Partnering with Families and Communities

Joyce L. Epstein and Karen Clark Salinas

A true school learning community engages families and community members in organized partnerships that improve the school and enhance student learning. A research-based framework from the National Network of Partnership Schools at Johns Hopkins University focuses on six areas of involvement for partnerships: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community. Numerous examples show how schools have successfully involved diverse parent populations in school activities; boosted achievement in reading, writing, and math; helped students plan for college and careers; and reached out to senior citizens, service agencies, and others. As federal laws, state and district policies, school goals, family expectations, and research on partnerships converge, schools are recognizing the many benefits of implementing partnerships that are well organized, linked to school goals, and sustainable.

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Once Upon a Time Before Brown: A Conversation with Clifton L. Taulbert

Marge Scherer

The author of Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and Habits of the Mind describes growing up in the 1950s in Mississippi. He reflects on the values his community instilled in him, the beneficial effects of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and on current concerns about the resegregation of schools in the United States.

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Transforming High Schools

Pedro A. Noguera

In a study of 10 high schools in Boston that had implemented various reforms, the author found that many of the reforms were not improving the experiences of students. For example, the school's strategies to provide remedial help to students who had failed the state high school exit exams focused on test-taking skills, rather than on the harder work of improving instruction. Schools had also implemented reforms aimed at personalizing learning, including Small Learning Communities, advisory periods, and block scheduling. Almost all of the schools, however, emphasized the form instead of the substance of these reforms. The author did find two schools in which reform efforts were producing higher student achievement. Both of these schools maintained a “laser-like focus on teaching and learning,” took time to make sure that teachers, parents, and students understood the purpose behind a reform strategy, and looked for evidence that the reform was achieving its goals instead of “introducing a reform and hoping for the best.” The author recommends that high schools seek input from students on how to make school more meaningful, and move past superficial reforms.

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Building a Community of Hope

Thomas J. Sergiovanni

Placing hope at the core of the school community provides encouragement, clear thinking, and informed action, writes the author. Although management theory often downplays the importance of hope and stresses objectivity and hard evidence, Sergiovanni asserts that educators can be both hopeful and realistic. Instead of just “facing reality”—accepting the inevitability of a situation—hopeful school leaders acknowledge reality but engage in actions that will bring about change. Because this plan must be grounded in the school community's core beliefs, the first step in building a hopeful school community is developing and articulating those believes. The author profiles schools that have built hopeful communities, including Samuel Gompers Elementary School in Detroit, Michigan.

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Moment to Moment at The Met

Dennis Littky, Nancy Diaz, Danique Dolly, Chris Hempel, Charlie Plant, Phil Price and Sam Grabelle

The Met, a high school in Providence, Rhode Island, has built a school culture in which all kinds of learning take place naturally, for all kinds of people, all the time. This vision of learning is implemented through such practices as small school size, student advisories, personal learning plans, quarterly exhibitions, and internships. In this article, however, the authors explain that the broader and deeper expression of the Met's vision does not reside in specific programs or activities, but rather in the everyday life of the school. They describe how the school builds a community of learners by incorporating equity and inclusiveness in school life, by modeling lifelong learning, by treating parents as active partners, by giving students a role in decision making, and by enabling students to support one another's learning. The Met model is now being implemented in additional schools across the country with funding from the Gates Foundation.

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Test Success, Family Style

Lamson T. Lam

A teacher at a low-performing urban school raises his 4th graders' achievement in two high-stakes standardized tests by holding family test preparation workshops. The author cites “early and positive” parent communication as crucial to parent involvement in such an initiative. Family test preparation workshops help parents understand their child's strengths and weaknesses in a given subject and suggest strategies for improvement. They also clarify what the test will cover and offer test-taking strategies that can improve student performance. Students participating in the two two-hour workshops scored 30 percent higher than they had done the previous year in similar tests. The workshops have the added benefit of lowering students' stress levels by building capacity and creating a team vision with a common goal.

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Family Literacy Nights . . . and Other Home-School Connections

Michaela W. Colombo

A Massachusetts school district discovers innovative ways of reaching out to the parents of English language learners, both raising student achievement and strengthening a school community. In its third year, Parent Partnership for Achieving Literacy (PAL) serves as a bridge between the community's culturally and linguistically diverse families and the mainstream school. The program, which includes community outreach, parent workshops, and in-house professional development, targets teachers and families of preK-3 students. Its goal is to help parents understand the literacy practices of the school while making teachers aware of the strengths that exist within culturally diverse families. PAL staff, bilingual parent coordinators, and education consultants from the University of Massachusetts have collaborated to provide training workshops for both parents and teachers, conduct biweekly family literacy nights, model mainstream literacy practices for culturally diverse parents, create a library of education materials, and encourage parents to attend ESL classes.

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Can Star Teachers Create Learning Communities?

Martin Haberman

In a school learning community, teachers pursue professional development, but they also learn for the sake of learning. Transmitting this love of learning is the surest way of teaching students to become turned-on learners. The author describes two sets of attributes: those of a successful learning community, which include continuous sharing of ideas, collaboration, and egalitarianism, and those of star teachers, who see the need for diverse low-income students to succeed in school “as a matter of life and death.” The challenge to the principal is to use star teachers in unobtrusive, supportive ways that do not threaten the rest of the faculty. Also, for the school to truly become a learning community, school leaders must reach the satisfactory teachers in the middle. Star teachers play an important role in positively influencing this group. To illustrate the effectiveness of a corps of star teachers, the author describes two failing schools that were reconstituted with a staff of star teachers. Both schools moved out of the failure category within the year.

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A Lifeline for New Teachers

Cynthia L. Carver

New teachers in under-resourced urban settings are leaving the teaching profession at an alarming rate. Faced with enormous challenges, these novice teachers often battle loneliness, desperation, and feelings of failure. One administrator in a diverse urban high school decided to do something about it: He started an after-school program for new teachers—Club Maroon—that offers the combination of a clear mission focused on good teaching, a safe space in which to reflect, and a team approach where everyone is committed to one another's success. Teachers have come to feel comfortable sharing the problems that they experience in their classrooms; the administrator-facilitator, while sharpening his skills as an instructional leader, can act on teachers' concerns and frustrations in ways that mentors cannot. The group provides more than emotional support: it also tackles a purposeful long-term plan to improve teaching practice. Participants share lesson plans, observe in one another's classrooms, and analyze student work. Noteworthy to those watching teacher retention rates, when the school year commenced the following year, all the new teachers in the program returned to teach.

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How Community Schools Make a Difference

Martin J. Blank

Community schools are centers of the community—open all day, every day, evenings, weekends, and summers. Partnerships are at the core of community schools, organized around a common goal: to help students learn and succeed and to strengthen families and communities. Partners include health and social agencies, family support groups, universities, youth development organizations, government, faith-based institutions, community groups, and others. Because community schools link school and community resources, they garner additional resources and thereby reduce the noninstructional demands on school staff members. They provide learning opportunities that enhance students' social, emotional, and physical development as well as their academic skills. They also offer students, their families, and the community important sources of “social capital”—the role models, life options, networks, and relationships that create a sense of belonging and communicate the importance of education and belief in the future.

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Helping New Teachers Cope

Cynthia Simon Millinger

According to research, nearly one-quarter of new teachers leave the profession after two years, and one-third leave after three years. Mentoring programs can help remedy this situation if the programs meet two important conditions. First, both mentor and mentee must have clearly defined and actionable roles and responsibilities. Second, both mentor and mentee must stand to gain from the process. The author suggests a mentoring program based on four principles: codevelopment and collaboration, observation and feedback, policies and systems, and encouragement and support. Using the process of codevelopment and collaboration, mentors and mentees can effectively work with one another to correctly assess new teachers' needs. Observation and feedback often work best if the mentee first visits the mentor's classroom. Mentors can help new teachers by sharing systems for organization, management, and instruction and can encourage them by relating their own struggles as new teachers.

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Tomorrow's Leaders Connect

Asena L. Mott

The author, a 5th-grade teacher, developed the Tomorrow's Leaders Connect program to promote her students' reading and writing skills. Each participating student was matched with a local community leader, exchanging letters and monitoring the local newspaper for articles mentioning the leader's activities. The year-long program produced multiple benefits as students wrote letters to their partners and improved their reading skills by eagerly reading the local newspaper. The personal attention of their partners also increased students' self-confidence. At a thank-you luncheon attended by students, community partners, and parents, it was clear that the program had forged strong ties between the school and the community.

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Creating a Laboratory for Democracy

Edith E. Beatty

As one of 11 First Amendment Schools across the United States, Fairview Elementary School's mission is to create an environment in which all members of the school community learn to practice their First Amendment freedoms and responsibilities. Launched jointly by ASCD and the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center in 2001, this nationwide initiative is designed to move the First Amendment's ideas out of textbook discussions and into practice. The First Amendment Schools Project not only has a profound effect on school culture—fostering collaboration and community and strengthening students', teachers', parents', and community members' connections to the school—but also can be aligned with federal and state academic standards and applied across the content areas through a focus on critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.

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A Village of Learners

E. Francine Guastello

Schools sometimes perceive parents—especially those in urban areas, of low socioeconomic means, or from single parent or nontraditional families—as disinterested in getting involved in their child's education. The author contends that if parents are to support the schools' efforts in accountability and improved teaching and learning, they must understand the expectations placed on their child in terms of learning outcomes and achievement. Ten small inner-city, low-income, multiethnic K-8 schools in New York City participate in Project TIE—Training Innovative Educators. The literacy component of the project includes four parent workshops that instruct parents in the writing process, in writing assessment, in state standards and their effect on their child's achievement, and in strategies for motivating their child to write. A parent survey showed that 50 percent of parents believed that their child had become less resistant to writing as a result of the strategies they learned in the workshops, and 90 percent reported that they felt more confident in their abilities to interact with their child on this topic.

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The Magic of Mentoring

Shelley R. Prince

A mentor coordinator for a 40-student mentoring program at Parklawn Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, provides real-life mentor-mentee anecdotes to illustrate how involving local residents willing to make a connection with young people has a positive effect on at-risk students. These benefits include an increase in self-confidence and self-esteem, better focus in class, and healthier relations with peers and adults. The author explains the importance of properly selecting, screening, and training volunteers to address the mentees' diverse needs.

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How the Community Influences Achievement

John H. Holloway

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Web Wonders / Schools as Learning Communities

Rick Allen

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ASCD Community in Action

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Does Social Promotion Work?

Denis P. Doyle

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EL Study Guide / Schools as Learning Communities

Miriam Goldstein

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