G - Global Collaboration
P - Professional Learning Communities and Networks
S - Shared Vision
Last week I blogged about Global Collaboration. This post is about Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) and Professional Learning Networks (PLNs). Before I go any further, I should define what a PLC and PLN are. (Does anyone else think that education has too many acronyms?)
A Professional Learning Community actually has many definitions. According to The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, these are the many ways to define a PLC:
- An ongoing process through which teachers and administrators work collaboratively to seek and share learning and to act on their learning, their goal being to enhance their effectiveness as professionals for students’ benefit (Hord, 1997)
- A school culture that recognizes and capitalizes on the collective strengths and talents of the staff (Protheroe, 2008).
- A strategy to increase student achievement by creating a collaborative school culture focused on learning (Feger & Arruda, 2008).
- Team members who regularly collaborate toward continued improvement in meeting learner needs through a shared curricular-focused vision (Reichstetter, 2006).
- A group of people sharing and critically interrogating their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive learning-oriented and growth-promoting way (McREL, 2003).
- Educators committed to working collaboratively in ongoing processes of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, & Many, 2006).
- An inclusive group of people, motivated by a shared learning vision, who support and work with each other to inquire on their practice and together learn new and better approaches to enhance student learning (Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Thomas, Wallace, Greenwood et al., 2005).
A Professional Learning Network (PLN) as defined by wikipedia is an informal learning network that consists of the people a learner interacts with and derives knowledge from in a personal learning environment. In a PLN, a person makes a connection with another person with the specific intent that some type of learning will occur because of that connection. It is based on the idea of connectivism developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Learners create connections and develop a network that contributes to their professional development and knowledge. The learner does not have to know these people personally or ever meet them in person
Global Collaboration, PLCs, and PLNs actually have a lot in common. They all relate to educators being connected. Global Collaboration focuses on being connected to educators obviously on a global scale, but PLCs and PLNs can and should also contain global contacts. Often we think of PLCs as being local, as within our building, district, or geographic area, because the purpose is about collaborating with others who are interested in improving curriculum, school culture, and/or student success. However, many educators are using tools like Twitter to connect to other educators like we never could before in order to seek out resources and tools to use in our classrooms to improve student growth. In order for an educator to be an integral part of their PLC, they need to be seeking out resources, research, and best practices. In order to get the full picture, they need to be connected to a global network of other like-minded educators.
Next month is Connected Educator month. There is a website http://connectededucators.org that lists daily activities that are happening throughout the month of October. They also have an awesome tool called the edConnectr that you can sign up for. You simply indicate your areas of expertise, what you can help with, what you would like help with, and your interests. The edConnectr will then show you other educators that match with what you selected so that you can connect and learn from them. To further prove that being a connected educator and Global Collaboration are indeed becoming related, Connected Educator month has in the past only been observed in the US. However, this year it is also bring celebrated in Australia, New Zealand, and Norway. Below is a video that discusses the importance of connected educators. If you are new to Twitter, pick any or all of the individuals in this video to follow and you will be off to a great start to your PLN.