What is a Professional Learning Communtiy?

After the past two weeks of reading it got me really thinking about our first posting and the professional learning communities we have been involved in personally.  I discussed how my schools meetings use the Dufour model.  I have to admit I did not know much more about the DuFour than those three questions we use at our meetings.  That is why I decided to do my first posting on an article written by Richard DuFour - What is a "Professional Learning Community"?  I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn more about DuFour's professional learning community model.


The article was a more in depth look at the DuFour model.  This model focuses on the core mission of education shifting from students being taught to ensuring the fact that students are actually learning.  Every professional in the building must work together to keep exploring how they want students to learn, how they will know when they have learned, and how they will respond when students are experiencing difficulty?  The part of the article that really touched me was the standard scenario where a teacher teaches unit and by the end some students still have not mastered the skills and the teacher is left to make a decision to move forward or go back and review again.  I feel like this happens frequently and I do not know what the correct thing to do is.  However, using this model the team makes decisions and works together to help the student.  The article truly explains a great environment to learn and work I see some components of this model within my school district, but I also feel like they are just expecting it to happen by merely presenting teachers with questions, standards, and curriculum.  Our school seems to be suffering from the data rich/information poor syndrome.  I think this information is useful because it presented examples of successful schools that use this model.  After the various readings I have done I am interested in continuing to learn more about how true professional learning communities work and operate within the school setting.

http://pdonline.ascd.org/pd_online/secondary_reading/el200405_dufour.html