Blazing New Trails - Connexions

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CRITICAL ISSUES IN SHARED LEADERSHIP
Professional Learning Communities: A Feasible Reality or a Chimera?
Ronald A. Lindahl
Many proponents of school improvement and reform look to changes in the
governance structures of schools, and even to the very culture of schools for lasting reform.
Today’s typical school structure is a hierarchical bureaucracy with top-down leadership and
considerable teacher isolation (Williams, Cate, & O’Hair, 2009). This is precisely why
Sarason (1996) termed the failure of school reform as “predictable.” Sarason stated that
without changing the hierarchical power relationships in schools, termed “heroic” or
“focused” leadership by Leithwood, Mascall, Strauss, Sacks, Memon, and Yashkina (2009, p.
223), large scale improvement would be unlikely to occur. There is some limited evidence
that schools that break this traditional structure and create new relationships among the adults
in the school can produce better student performance in math, science, and reading, as well as
lower dropout, truancy, and absenteeism rates (Rasberry, with Mahajan, 2008).
Advocates for less hierarchical, more distributed leadership have long existed (e.g.,
Follett, 1940). However, it is only relatively recently that this concept has gained increased
attention in schools. This attention has manifested itself in the literature related to teacher
leadership, collaborative leadership, distributed leadership, and shared leadership. To many
authors, these terms are relatively interchangeable, whereas to others (e.g., Spillane, 2006)
each connotes a specific leadership structure. Because there is not general agreement on the
specificity of these terms (Leithwood, Mascall, & Strauss, 2009b), for purposes of this
chapter, they are treated more or less as synonyms.
However, one model of such schools that create new governance structures and
cultures in schools is referred to as communities of practice (Printy, 2008; Sergiovanni, 2000),
learning organizations (Senge, Cambron-McCabe, Lucas, Smith, Dutton, & Kleiner, 2000;
Wells & Feun, 2007), professional communities (Williams et al., 2009), or, most recently,
professional learning communities (DuFour, Eaker, & DuFour, 2005; Giles & Hargreaves,
2006; Gregory & Kuznich, 2007; Harris & Muijs, 2005; Rasberry, with Mahajan, 2008;
Sparks, 2005). The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2004) considered
these arrangements so crucial that their Standards mandate that teachers must be members of
such learning communities. The purpose of this chapter, then, was to examine the potential
benefits and challenges of professional learning communities for pre-K through 12 education.
DEFINITION OF PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES
The concept of professional learning communities arises from the teacher leadership
movement. Pounder (2006) captured the essence of teacher leadership by defining it as a
process rather than an issue of position, as an array of behaviors and characteristics rather
than of duties. Muijs and Harris (2007) agreed, describing it as a fluid, emerging form of
leadership rather than a fixed phenomenon. York-Barr and Duke (2004) added to this,
positing that active involvement by individuals at all levels of an organization is needed if
organizational change is to take hold. This involvement may be at the instructional, professional
Ronald A. Lindahl, Alabama State University