Commitment to sustainability and capacity building

If the routines and culture of a professional learning community are working properly, they should provide a self-renewal mechanism for the community. That is, they should build the capacity of the community to achieve ongoing improvements in both professional and student learning.

What the literature says

Research into sustainability is still in its early stages. Bolam et al. (2005) note that because leadership succession seems to be a factor in a professional learning community’s decline, much of this research is focusing on the nature of the leadership required to build capacity and sustain improvement. They cite findings from one longitudinal study:

A longitudinal study of change over time in Canada and the United States, from the perspective of staff who worked in eight secondary schools in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s suggests that sustaining change requires: sustaining deep learning; involving a broad range of people in “chains of influence”; spreading improvements beyond individual schools; it being done on existing resources, not through special projects where the funding then dries up; nourishing and taking care of people, rather than burning them out; sharing responsibility; activist engagement to secure outside support; and develop[ing] capacity that enables “people to adapt to, prosper and learn from each other in their increasingly complex environment” (Hargreaves, 2004).

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Timperley et al. (2007) found only seven studies that satisfied their criterion for sustainability. While there are similarities between their findings and those in the study cited above, for example, in the importance of leadership and organisational support, other key factors also seem to be the need for theoretical knowledge, inquiry skills, and the ability to self-regulate learning.

Features of professional learning and development that were associated with sustained student outcomes included a strong theoretical base that provided the foundation for principled decisions about practice, and the skills to collect relevant evidence and use it to inquire into the impact of teaching on student learning, particularly in relation to understanding students’ problematic thinking or achievement.

… The evidence related to sustainability is consistent with the conditions known to promote self-regulated learning for teachers. Self-regulated learners are able to answer three questions: "Where am I going?", "How am I going?", and "Where to next?" (Hattie and Timperley, 2007). Teachers with both inquiry skills and content knowledge, and who received support from their leaders, were consistently able to do this in terms of the impact of their teaching on student learning.

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Implications for ISTEs

Fullan (2005) describes the kind of professional learning community that ISTEs need to develop and work within in order to create sustainability. He argues that the benefit of groups outside schools establishing their own learning communities is that it gives them understanding of the change process and the corresponding capacity building that needs to be done.

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