Professional Learning Community Within an Educational Context

¶ … Professional Learning Community within an Educational Context

Peter Senge's learning community is one where all of the team members work together within in a fluid, supportive atmosphere that is future based and oriented around critical, open thinking.

His five principles of learning communities are:

Systems thinking -- namely seeing a problem in terms of its long-term holistic perspective and ramifications. Seeing different connections among the problem or studied material

Personal mastery -- includes characteristics such as commitment to truth, creativity, personal vision, and persistence

Mental models -- we each see in terms of certain heuristics. Interpretations of the world. Openness towards differences of these mental models and willingness to change them are characteristics of a viable learning community.

Building shared vision -- where the team works towards a shared goal.

Team learning -- an interaction where all are open to learning with and from the other

Senge's learning community was formed in reference to organizations and managers. Much of the focus of his work was with the business leader in mind.

Sergiovanni's (1994) work, on the other hand, was directed to the school environment and he approaches the learning community with a social constructionist perspective integrated with an existentialist or Buberian perspective. The term 'community', he argues, is trite and should be rather formulated to refer to one where a set of single individuals are recombined from an entity of individual 'I's to a constructive whole of 'we'. In this unity of 'we' (the I-thou of Buber indicating fusion rather than an I-It of separateness), values, beliefs, practices, and ways of thinking are informed and reformed into different and reinforced wholes. The learning community becomes one of a tightly knit learning structure or group where learning can take on more of a meaningful support in the environment of a cohesive and supportive whole.

Munro (n.d.) extends his learning community from a group of individuals to that of the school as a whole. He recommends that for optimum learning or pedagogical instruction to occur in a school, three sorts of capital have to be utilized and these in turn are:

Intellectual capital -- the intellectual knowledge of the school. To mobilize and collate that base in order to generate effective individual learning

Social capital- the level of belief that the community has within itself that it can generate the necessary cohesiveness and support for effective learning. That all will be motivated to work together as a group.

Organizational capital -- the organization and management knowledge necessary for fostering change, setting up the optimal environment and encouraging scholastic learning.

All three conditions are necessary for optimum leaning to occur within the school.

Although all three theorists discuss the learning community, each differs in various ways. Senge's learning community refers to an organization, whilst that of Sergiovanni has unrestricted connotations (although it seems to apply to an academically-minded organization). Munro, on the other hand, overtly refers to a school environment.

Senge also defines characteristics of a learning community whilst Sergiovanni debates the traditional perspective of a learning community and recommends the overall form that one should take for success, whilst Munro speaks not about the characteristics of the learning community itself but, rather, about its prerequisite resources. There are other differences, but I see these as being the primary ones.