Abstract:

Bill Ferriter, a North Carolina NBCT, describes how Jolly outlines action steps based on her research: build the foundation, preview the process, organize the teams, define team expections, analyze the data, plan for learning and action, conduct successful meetings, maintain the momentum, etc.

Citation: Jolly, A. (2005). A facilitator’s guide to professional learning teams: Creating on-the-job opportunities for teachers to continually learn and grow. Oxford, OH: SERVE.

Author: Anne Jolly

Full Text:

By Anne Jolly
2005 (192 pp./paperback)
SERVE
Call 800-755-3277 to inquire about paper copies
Available from the National Staff Development Council

Reviewed by Bill Ferriter
Salem Middle School
Wake County Public School System

Establishing schools that function as professional learning communities is currently recognized as a reform strategy with great potential. Professional learning communities empower teachers to look reflectively at their practice in teams, focusing on student achievement. Teachers working in professional learning teams engage in powerful conversations about "best practices," opening the door to school improvement and personal growth.

But working in professional learning teams does not come naturally to teachers. The structure of schools naturally promotes isolation, as teachers have little time or opportunity during the day to interact as professionals. What's more, the culture of schooling has encouraged self-reliance. Teachers tend to believe that collaboration may expose personal weaknesses that they are unwilling to reveal. Isolation is profoundly embedded in the way schools work.

So, how does a school promote a collaborative environment where powerful conversations flourish? How can an interested administrator or teacher leader establish a structure for professional learning within a building where isolation is long-standing characteristic of adult interactions? Downloading a copy of Anne Jolly's Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams would be a great first step!

Jolly, a former Alabama Teacher of the Year, is currently a Senior Education Program Specialist at SERVE, where she supports schools interested in developing professional learning teams. Jolly has been interested in the potential of teacher collaboration throughout her teaching career. As she describes, "I wondered what it would be like to work in an environment that encourages teacher collaboration, support and personal growth. What would happen if teachers worked collectively to increase our expertise and change our teaching practices? Together, could we break the chains of tradition and forge a new way of doing business?"

Jolly received grants from the SERVE Regional Educational Laboratory and the Mobile (AL) Area Education Foundation to study teacher collaboration. Completing an action research project with two area middle schools, Jolly found that professional learning teams could have an impact on student achievement. Excited by these results, she began to "develop, establish, support and document a process of teacher collaboration."

A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams is the end result of that documentation. As Jolly writes, "What I offer the reader are the results of my own search for professional community and my work with committed teachers and principals.... We learned as many of you are learning—out of a need and by trial and experiment. I share these tools...in the hope that you will become accomplished in transforming schools into a place where teachers can continually learn and grow."

The process of establishing professional learning teams is broken into four areas by Jolly: Prepare to Do the Work, Do the Work, Examine the Results, and Sustain the Teams. Each of these areas is further divided into ten action steps. These action steps are:

• Build the Foundation
• Preview the Process
• Organize the Teams
• Define Team Expectations
• Analyze the Data
• Plan for Learning and Action
• Conduct Successful Meetings
• Maintain the Momentum
• Assess Team Progress
• Facilitation 101

Each step begins with a review of the research supporting the action. Jolly has drawn from the work of leading learning community experts like Richard Dufour, Robert Eaker, Carlene Murphy, Robert Garmston, Bruce Wellman and Shirley Hord to introduce the concept of professional collaboration. Then, Jolly provides a facilitation guide and practical tools for each step. These tools are all "ready-to-use" and range from surveys and data collection records to learning team log sheets and norm setting protocols.

Researchers have been promoting teacher collaboration as a means to school reform for many years. Consider that Jolly was influenced by the work of Linda Darling Hammond and her colleagues, who, in 1996, recommended to the National Commission on Teaching for America's Future that school structures be changed to encourage collective effort on the part of teachers. Since that time, professional literature has continued to focus on the "why" behind learning communities, but little has been written to lead educators through the daunting process of making collaboration a regular part of school culture.

A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams makes that concept practical and approachable. As Dr. Shirley Hoard, Scholar Emerita at the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, writes, "Anne has taken the essentials of an improvement or reform process and translated them ever so well into the activities of a learning community of professionals in the school." This facilitator's guide is a starting point for school leaders interested in exploring the potential for reform that exists within their own building, and it is a significant contribution to the professional learning community movement.

Tools and resources are designed to complement and update information in A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams are available at this SERVE webpage.

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