With gratitude,
Paul

Teacher practice changes come from personal experiences and trial and error. Reflection and a chance to hear the stories of others helps to tweak something and try again. Often teacher roles change so quickly one does not get to reflect on the new results before being pushed into a new setting/grade/position causing a disconnect.

An online community could evolve out of each building’s conversations. Who will establish these? Who will guide the learners? Who will trouble shoot the problems? Layers of PD could naturally fit into this. We are heading into early release or late starts this next year. We could document our ongoing work and share it out. Again, who can facilitate this? Perhaps it will be born from the bottom up. Perseverance is a trait that keeps the educator moving forward.

Thanks for sharing and getting me thinking in this area, again.

For an example of how this was done in the past with a similar construct, consider the ways in which “accommodations” are currently conceived of by teachers and enacted in their classroom practices. Originally conceived of as a means for connecting students’ educational needs with instructional practices, the word “accommodations” is now frequently (in the eyes of teachers) synonymous with a trite, routinized laundry list of particular hoop-jumpings required by an overseeing bureaucracy.

So, in the service of finding better ways to “individualize” the curriculum (or instruction), we simply find more nuanced ways to mechanize our practices — add another level to the flow chart of teaching decisions and actions. The humanistic urge that you seem to suggest in your post becomes another gear in the machine.

Of course, this assumes a level of attachment to a ‘networked’ idea of teaching and learning that is not ubiquitous in classrooms. The studies that show PLCs to be efficacious are those that focus on teachers who engage them — in the non-research world of schoolteacher professional development this trait is more rare (not absent, but rare, nonetheless). The problem that scholars of PD run into, it seems, is that they too-often assume teachers will default to some sort of unified affect regarding PLCs, when the reality of school contexts makes this a highly specious assumption.

Be wary of this tendency to generalize — it affects teacher researchers and teacher educators at least as often as it does teachers.

No longer is the work of educational teams limited to face-to-face around the table collaboration. No longer is specialization or the knowledge base limited to who is physically sitting in the meeting. No longer is email viewed as the technology of choice for collaboration. No longer are teams limited by geography. No longer should great ideas remain trapped inside particular grade levels, departments, or schools. Technology has allowed us to change all that. Technology has created a new reality.

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative

http://educationinnovation.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/welcome-to-the-revolution-the-professional-networked-learning-collaborative.html

First, technology enables different types of relationships. Virtual relationships are now possible and have become commonplace outside of educational settings. Networks of all sorts (Facbebook, Ning, Twitter, etc.) webcams, Skype, etc. have changed the very definition of presence. Second, technology has changed who is part of the team. Team members can now be virtual. Members no longer tied to geographic limitation can provide input, ideas, and collaborate in real-time for any location on the globe. The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative enabled through technology expands the borders of membership to include specialist, consultants, district staff, etc as part of the team.

The person is the portal to the network. The person is an autonomous communication and collaboration node. Each member can potentially leverage not only their network, but also the network of others who are in their network. This principle is known as Metcalfe’s Law. The number of potential connections between nodes grows more quickly than the number of nodes. The total value of the network where each node can reach every other node in the network grows with the square of the number of nodes. In other words, when PNLC members connect their networks, it creates more value than the sum of networks independently.

The essence of the PNLC is that the “who” of potential members and collaborators is increased exponentially because of individual members networking through collaborative technology platforms, the “what.”

As sociologist Barry Wellman said, “Each person operates his networks to obtain information, collaboration, orders, support, sociability, and a sense of belonging”

So, just at the individual educator has become networked, so too must the Professional Learning Community. And when a PLC becomes networked, it becomes something different. The PLC becomes the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative.

Anyways, great post. A lot to think about. Will follow on Twitter too.