Doug Johnson

BLB or PLC
Head for the Edge, Library Media Connection, January 2008

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead

There is a very good chance your school is deeply invested in the philosophy and practice of staff development through Professional Learning Communities. Reduced to its simplest definition, a PLC is a group of professionals working collaboratively to discuss and practice effective professional strategies in order to increase student performance.

Professional skeptic that I am, I thought, “Yeah, right. Let’s put a few teachers in a room and expect them to teach themselves new methods that will actually change educational practice. Maybe we ought to call them BLBs – Blind Leading the Blinds.”

Even PLC guru Richard DuFour in his ASCD Educational Leadership article, “What is a Professional Learning Community?” (May 2004) <http://www.simagis.org/prodev/documents/PLC.pdf> writes:

People use this term to describe every imaginable combination of individuals with an interest in education—a grade-level teaching team, a school committee, a high school department, an entire school district, a state department of education, a national professional organization, and so on. In fact, the term has been used so ubiquitously that it is in danger of losing all meaning.

But there are more formal descriptions of Professional Learning Communities including this one:

“teachers in a school and its administrators continuously seek and share learning and then act on what they learn. The goal of their actions is to enhance their effectiveness as professionals so that students benefit. This arrangement has also been termed communities of continuous inquiry and improvement…

The requirements necessary for such organizational arrangements include:

• the collegial and facilitative participation of the principal, who shares leadership - and thus, power and authority - through inviting staff input in decision making
• a shared vision that is developed from staff’s unswerving commitment to students’ learning and that is consistently articulated and referenced for the staff’s work
• collective learning among staff and application of that learning to solutions that address students’ needs
• physical conditions and human capacities that support such an operation (Southwest Education Development Laboratory, “Issues About Change,” Vol 6. No 1, 1997) <www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues61.html>

Note in the definition above how many times the terms share, collegial, learn, collective and community are used.  How do school library media specialists fit into PLCs – and help keep them from becoming BLBs?

I would suggest that some simple Web 2.0 tools can enhance a PLCs efforts. It is our job as library media specialists to help make sure our teaching teams know about and can effectively use these tools. (It is my long-held belief that once teachers experience the educational benefits of these tools personally, they will be more likely to use them with students in their own classrooms as well.) The two simple tools that come immediately to mind are wikis and social bookmarking sites.

• Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or furl are a great way for these study groups to collect, share and organize websites dedicated to educational research that address specific educational areas. Lists of web resources can be collaboratively compiled, annotated, tagged and shared with all members of the PLC – and with other educators who are attempting to solve similar problems in their own schools.  If the PLC is to be research-driven, having research commonly available is a rather nice thing.
• Wikis can be used for a variety of PLC purposes. Jointly created and edited, pages of group norms, goals, data, activities, and descriptions of specific techniques can be created quickly with little technical sophistication needed on the part of the group members. Wikis can comprise an unlimited number of pages, and can contain links, documents and graphic materials.

Media specialists can certainly form their own “communities of learning.” Our district has taken this approach for the last two years. Using data from state and local reading assessment, our K-12 library media specialists have identified target populations with reading difficulties, including boys, reluctant readers, and ELL students. Meeting on a monthly basis, the library media specialist PLC has found, read and discussed research on reaching these groups and have shared resources and strategies to meet their needs. Reports of group activities indicate this has been time well spent.

The second way library media specialists can participate can be as active members of their building, departmental or grade level PLCs, sharing resources and practicing techniques designed to meet the goals of these groups (as well as teaching and supporting the use of the tools mentioned above). This is a great way to be recognized as a full and contributing member of the teaching staff.

So how should you be involved – as part of a librarian PLC or as part of a building PLC? Probably both. It’s up to you to make sure that it is those with vision leading change in your schools – not the blind!