Schools as Professional Communities: Addressing the Collaborative Challenge, 6(17)

Abstract

Increasingly, attention is being given to the need to establish and sustain schools as professional learning communities. No aspect of that objective is more critical than that of fostering the collective capacity of teachers to work together toward continuous school improvement, and by extension, toward enhanced student outcomes. Beyond this recognition and the appended rhetoric, however, remain very real practical concerns—not the least of which is the professional perspectives of teachers themselves. The study reported here used survey data collected from 238 Louisiana teachers in ten districts and eighty-eight schools to reveal additional understandings about what is at once a cogent yet complex and highly contextual aspiration. Although there appears to be a general sense among teachers as to what is desirable in terms of sustaining schools as collaborative communities, conditions in their own schools continue to impede such realization, and some schools, by their very structure and size, may be more or less predisposed to collaborative orientations.