Profound Improvement: Building Capacity for a Learning Community

Citation

Tam Wai Ming, F. (2001), "Profound Improvement: Building Capacity for a Learning Community", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 394-398. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2001.39.4.394.2

There is often a close relationship between teacher development and school change, a relationship where successful change in school depends much on continuous teacher development. Yet, the situation of teacher development today has come to a point where its effectiveness depends not so much on the formal training programs organized by the universities and educational authorities, but on whether a school can engage teachers in every learning opportunity within the workplace. Therefore, sustainable learning takes place where schools can invent new approaches to professional development, engage teachers in reflective, experiential learning, and overcome the different organizational and personal barriers which hinder learning. A school which does these successfully is deemed to be able to deal with external reform initiatives positively, empower its teachers to achieve multiple goals, and maintain long‐term effectiveness. Coral Mitchell and Larry Sackney aim to address this issue in their exciting new book. The theme of the book targets building personal, interpersonal and organizational capacity for professional development using the community metaphor. The authors combined coherent arguments with ample real cases to support their assertions, and all of these are consistent with existing research in organizational and adult learning.

The use of community as a metaphor to describe the school organization has been proposed by many academics. The traditional school organization, which takes on a bureaucratic structure, assumes a contractual relationship among the school members, and operates with an instrumental purpose, profoundly shapes the kind of learning that takes place within the organization. Learning, in such situation, is passive, incremental, and focuses only on immediate needs. The concept of community is an antithesis of the bureaucratic organization. The authors use the community metaphor to describe a setting where the administrators and teachers in an educational organization form a network of relationships based on mutual trust, friendship, and collective goals. A community differs from a bureaucratic organization in that school administrators do not rely on external control to force people to work. Instead, itrelies on norms, purposes, values, professional socialization, collegiality, andnatural interdependence. Once established, the norms and networks ofcommunity become substitutes for the formal system. Under such circumstances, there is little need for formal appraisal, systems of coordination, and even leadership in the conventional sense.

Chapter one of the book describes the meaning of and the need for a learning community in modern‐day schooling, and the contextual elements for building capacity to learn. Chapters two and three focus on building individual capacity for learning in the workplace. The authors summarize the current research on adult learning, emphasizing a combination of reflective learning, network building, and action learning in their conceptual model. They also warn against the danger of teachers forming closed ties exclusively among friends and colleagues, which may hinder them from exploring new relationships and learning new knowledge.

Chapters four and five are related to the development of a productive climate and team dynamic for learning within a school. Based on the available research on group dynamics, the authors explain the conditions, the processes, and the different phases for group learning. Behind every effective team, they suggest, there needs to be a relationship of mutual trust, caring and a collaborative culture.

Chapters six to eight are related to the elements within the school organization that support a learning community. First, the authors explain that in order to break down the walls that have typically separated people in schools, the elements of structural arrangements, collaborative processes, and socio‐cultural conditions are indispensable. Second, they discuss the issue of leadership, and point out that the leader needs to balance the use of systemic, political and cultural leadership to build a supportive environment for learning. Third, they suggest the need to create the conditions and administrative support to engage the school organization in sustainable learning.

Chapter nine, the final chapter, talks about a macroscopic view of schooling and the school organization. According to the authors, the current conception of schooling, which was based on a dominant positivist methodology, mechanistic worldview, instrumental relationships between people and learning, is in crisis. They suggest that there needs to be a complete change of paradigm to the community metaphor, a new conception of schooling based on an interpretivist methodology and the generative nature of learning. They also suggest a series of strategies to make a smooth transition from the old paradigm to the new one. These strategies, although not yet proven, should be seriously considered.

To conclude, the book will be of interest to both academics and practitioners. The authors have done a good job of integrating the theories of adult learning, team building, and organizational learning into a cohesive model of learning community, explaining the different aspects of their model with clear and forceful arguments, and supporting their assertions with ample real cases. Their enthusiasm and commitment to promote profound improvement in schools for the benefit of future generations are clearly demonstrated throughout the chapters. The book will be a useful reference to those who are responsible for organizing professional development activities in a school and will be of particular interest to those who are dissatisfied with the current paradigm of professional development and wish to make some profound changes.