Kleine-Kracht (as cited in
Hord, 1997) declaimed that the time of traditional top-down pattern of
relationships to manage a school was over. There is parallelism between those
who are more experienced and those who are less experienced but they need to
contribute to school effectiveness. Retallick and Datoo (2005) added that
the principals are called leading learners in professional learning communities
by emphasizing that teaching and learning is a process that is closely
relational to the teachers and encourages them to improve their professional practices.
Teaching and learning through a student-centered approach
used by the principal is an indicator of the school as a professional learning
community. Hargreaves described the role of the principal of the Blue Mountain
School in Ontario which possessed the essence of a knowledge-society school. The
principal established the school as a professional learning community and
believed that schools should provide learning opportunities where students
would continuously reconstruct their experiences. In order to achieve that very
vision, the principal required a professional culture that engaged teachers. Support staff, students, and the community for defining the school’s goals and the
strategies to achieve those goals.
The relationships were established with the
community members through monthly meetings and parents were asked to work with
the staff to define the knowledge, skills, and values they wanted for the
students. During the process of recruiting staff for the school, the principal
considered the interrelationships and consequences for other schools and the
set criteria which matched with other schools. When the principal established
the team of ten teachers initially, he did not allocate specific roles to the
staff to create a sense of a whole among them rather than separate entities.
Staff meetings, meetings of the school council, and leadership team meetings were
carefully planned.
Each meeting started with the system’s issues and every
individual was free to identify problems that were dealt with by the staff members
and fear of blame was removed as it would lead to hiding issues. The same
procedure of meetings was used in individual advisory sessions and collective
meetings with the students which led the students to take the responsibility for
bringing change to the school.
In a project to transform a school into a professional
learning community, Servgiovanni (1994) shared the story of a principal whose
shared leadership started from one of the meetings with two parents to develop
exploring skills among the students. With the passage of time more and more
parents and staff joined the scheduled meeting thus developing a vision for
staff and students’ learning that eventually took the shape of a project. The
principal’s efforts were evidently decisive in creating the situation necessary
to build a professional learning community.
The data of a case study conducted by Zepeda (2004)
looking at the work of a principal in a school who used instructional
supervision for developing a professional learning community revealed that the
first steps were building trust and rapport with the teachers. Zepeda found
from the data that the principal created conditions where the teachers examined
their practices which encouraged them to form a learning community. She got
an insight that leadership needs to be shared in such a way that every
individual should perform the role of leadership according to the required
expertise at a time. The principal relinquished her top-down control and
provided the opportunities for teachers to come forward to create and craft new
ways to develop themselves professionally.
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