Abstract
Professional learning communities are the latest fad in education, but they have little to do with promoting professionalism.
In my rookie year as a middle school English teacher, I was in over my head. Literally isolated in a portable classroom behind the gymnasium, I was confronted not only by a largely indifferent group of 7th graders, but also by a vivid catalogue of modern social ills: poverty, drug abuse, gangs, divorce, child neglect, parents in jail, bipolar disorder, bullying, teen pregnancy, and Goth fashion. Some of these problems were compounded because I was working in a high-poverty, low-literacy city — the largest urban community on the U.S-Mexico border. It also goes without saying that I had the usual groups for whom numerous laws required that I modify instruction — learning disabled, English language learners, and gifted — all in the same room at the same time.
That first year didn't go well, but it could have been worse. What kept me afloat was the advice and encouragement of my English department chair, still a close friend, and the support and expertise of my interdisciplinary academic team. All veteran teachers — the same faculty, in fact, that had taught me in middle school, for I was an alumnus. They welcomed me into the fold and treated me as an equal from my first day. In our regular meetings, we identified struggling students, called in parents, and developed interventions. They tutored me in their own, faculty-initiated innovations, such as the daily schoolwide math activity and the student-led conferences held every spring. The science teacher on my team, in her last year before retirement, invited me to collaborate with her on a zoology project for which students would write an essay in my class.
When I moved on to a larger middle school five years later, I was privileged to join another team of veteran teachers, this time in the school's gifted and talented department. Each of us taught humanities, a composite language arts and social studies class, and, over the following two summers, we cowrote a new curriculum for 7th graders, then piloted it, and presented it to other humanities teachers across the district. Neighboring districts expressed interest in buying our work. I don't remember a more satisfying collaboration with other teachers, either across disciplines or across schools.
I now teach Advanced Placement and dual-credit English at my alma mater. Again, I find myself with some of the same teachers who taught me years earlier. Our junior English team meets regularly, and we plan and administer common assessments, then analyze the results. The other AP and dual-credit teachers and I share syllabi and strategies frequently, if not regularly. And after a mere 12 years of teaching, I have never been more eager to share my limited experience with colleagues, to learn from them, to break out of the enervating box of daily routine and mere survival.
And that is why I oppose the professional learning communities (PLC) movement.
Conform!
My problem with PLCs is not the notion of collaboration; it's the PLC movement's blithe confidence that meaningful collaboration can be coerced and efficiently managed — by collaboration “experts,” no less. It is an administrative, clinical ideal of collaboration, and, as such, it is not for me. Its pretension to equity, to teaching as medicine, to constant data crunching and dutiful adherence to mission and vision statements offends me. Worst of all is its glib talk of guarantees. Would that doctors and lawyers could guarantee every outcome; they might actually merit higher salaries than teachers.
If the PLC movement were strictly about collaboration, we might expect a moniker slightly less epic. We might simply call it “collaboration.” Why all the fuss? Why the sudden supernova of books, workshops, and top-dollar consultants? Why the haste to “reculture” schools, many of which are in no immediate crisis? Only a monolithic ideology requires such feverish churching, and the PLC priesthood has come calling at my district and at my school more than once. I have listened patiently to their sermons, I have read their literature with what I consider great thought and care, and I now know that while “Collaborate!” might be the great PLC rallying cry, the movement's core orthodoxy is actually captured better by another, less attractive c-word: “Conform!”
Funny how, in any collaborative effort, the pesky details often turn out to be seismic lines of division. Witness the sharp differences between students who have derailed many a cooperative-learning lesson. In advocating what is essentially cooperative learning for teachers, PLC purveyors have claimed that collaboration fosters trust. Maybe so, but it also frequently uncovers intractable — though no less valid — differences that are human as well as professional. My question is not how to resolve these differences, but whether they should be resolved at all.
There are bedrock historical reasons why teachers have tended to work in isolation, and they have nothing to do with selfishness or personal fiefdom nor can they be neutralized by “reculturing” or a two-day workshop. For one thing, they represent the lines of division within education itself. Improbable as it seems, neither our profession nor our nation have ever clearly agreed on what it means to be “educated.” Many of our professional attitudes about school are also generational and cultural, often intimately linked to our very motives for seeking a life in education in the first place. These involve the teachers who influenced us, the manner in which we were taught and raised, the specific disciplines we teach, and our individual career goals. That doesn't mean these core beliefs are always good for students, but it does mean that if we're going to deal with them, the discussion had better be genuine. It should seek consensus whenever possible, but it must also accept that there are matters on which we will never reach consensus. A more lucid intellect than mine once dubbed this “the human condition.”
All education is ideological. Too often, the compromising over what students should learn and how they should best learn it only skirts these seismic differences, resulting in hodgepodge curriculum and poor learning. Indeed, this is one of my own constant frustrations, one whose fallout I confront on the job every day. PLCs claim to solve this by anointing the organization — the school or school district — with absolute authority on the question of values. This cannot work because, while school districts govern their employees, they do not govern the academic subjects. Nor do states. But then PLC adherents cite professionalism as the other determinant of values and practice. Above all, no individual teacher must ever be allowed to do as he or she pleases. Consider just a few of the fundamentals on which our profession cannot make up its own collective mind: How do we know when a child has “learned” something? How do we determine what “important literature” is? How do we balance the common curriculum with individual student interests?
And how do we resolve these existential questions? I don't believe we should attempt to do so — at least not on a global level. Global answers to ideological questions are destructive, even when they seem otherwise. If that's too melodramatic, then let's try it another way: If the PLC movement is right about what effective teachers do, then effective teachers have been doing it since long before there was a PLC movement. Did they arrive at their expertise by mandate? Most of them did not or at least the mandates didn't contribute half as much as those individual teachers' pursuit of their own core values in the course of their work. When we globalize values or, worse, codify them in the name of professionalism or anything else, something is always lost or diluted. Contrived collaboration, imposed and managed through hierarchy, is meaningless and paradoxical. I am arguing, in short, for freedom from ideology.
My problem with PLCs is not the notion of collaboration; it's the PLC movement's blithe confidence that meaningful collaboration can be coerced and efficiently managed.
If teachers were better versed in the research, they might be better prepared to fight the tiresome carnival of frauds, fads, and hustles that have plagued our profession for much longer than 30 years.
Fad chasing
The historic divide between researchers and peasant teachers is one of several elephants in the room. Both communities are guilty of “working in isolation.” PLC adherents, to their credit, mourn this gap between research and practice, insisting that teachers seek constant updates on best practice and “current reality.” I mourn it, too, because I believe that, if teachers were better versed in the research, they might be better prepared to fight the tiresome carnival of frauds, fads, and hustles that have plagued our profession for much longer than 30 years.
Fad chasing has cost us much as a profession; it has cost our students more. In Left Back (Simon & Schuster, 2000), education historian Diane Ravitch recounts the fads era by era. Whether the motivation was profit, ideology, or genuine earnest intent, the trail of wreckage left by I.Q. testing, “mental hygiene,” Life Adjustment, the open-classrooms craze, whole language, and so-called fuzzy math is sobering. If anything is certain, it's that the damage of these episodes cannot be ascribed to rogue teachers doing as they pleased. The blame rested with “experts,” big-name gurus toting an avalanche of research. The repercussions linger: In that first year of teaching, I was amazed to find that not only did few of my 7th graders know or understand the basic parts of speech, but also virtually none could distinguish between vowels and consonants. My students were products of the whole language movement of the 1990s. I was unaware that I had benefitted from a brief resurgence of phonetic reading instruction and rote memorization when I was growing up in the 1970s.
In Visible Learning (Routledge, 2009), John Hattie discusses one of the most important and most resolutely ignored education studies of all time: Project Follow-through, a 10-year longitudinal study that compared the effects of several different instructional strategies, including some of the trendiest “student-centered” pedagogies of the day. The only clear winner, by a long shot, was the scripted, decidedly old-school program known as Direct Instruction. Naturally, the establishment's reaction was to wipe the egg from its collective face and pour more money and effort into its ideologically preferred programs for years afterward.
There are conspicuously few PLC-type connections among educational researchers. As Ellen Condliffe Lagemann says in An Elusive Science (University of Chicago Press, 2000), “Education research has never developed a close-knit professional community, which is a prerequisite for the creation of regulatory structures that can protect both the welfare and safety of the public at large and the integrity of the profession.” Indeed, not only is collaboration within the research community entirely at will and driven by naked self-interest, but there is also no common standard of research design and methodology: A meta-analysis is as good as a controlled, randomized study is as good as a questionnaire. So, for that matter, are stacked quote-citations from like-minded “experts.”
Ditto for private educational consultants — the speakers, authors, and presenters who play such a vital role in propelling each new reform craze. No code of professional ethics governs their behavior. Their fees and services are discreetly negotiated between vendors and school districts, and their hiring is almost exclusively a matter of personal preference among administrators. Could there be a more obvious example of a rogue professional?
Going to church?
I don't know any teacher who enjoys working “in isolation,” nor do I know any who enjoy working in lockstep with each other. A cautious balance between the two would seem in order. But PLC advocates are only interested in half the equation. An exact definition of teacher professionalism is elusive, but, if we can agree that serving students is the primary interest of the professional teacher, then organizational loyalty must be a secondary interest at best. I'm disturbed by PLC rhetoric and its implication that a teacher's highest responsibility is to carry out the organization's will, be it effective pedagogy or some outrageous new gimmick. Organizations can be as wrong as individuals. I'm disturbed when a PLC advocate expresses indignation at a teacher disregarding a benchmark test, as if all benchmarks are flawless by nature. I'm disturbed at the implication that, during hiring, PLCs should give more weight to a teaching candidate's beliefs than to her or his competence. I reject their assertion that teachers should devote extra resources not only to the struggling student but to the unmotivated student who holds every societal advantage yet considers any demanding intellectual work beneath his or her existence. I dislike PLC's penchant for groupthink, its “change-process” fetish, and its insinuation that individual teachers, under reasonable supervision, can't be trusted to do the right thing. I do not always agree with them, nor they with me, but I would trust any of my colleagues to make the right choice for their students with or without my consent. They are the only bona fide educational “experts” I know.
Teacher autonomy — or, if you insist, teacher isolation — is a critical safeguard against bad ideology. If there is no longer room for individual thought in education, then there is no longer room for ideas. If there is no room for idiosyncrasy, then there is no room for innovation. If there is no room for dissent, then there is no room for integrity.
See you in church.