Professional Learning Networks

Facilitating Transformation in Diverse Contexts with Equity-seeking Communities

Leyton Schnellert

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781787698949
• eBook ISBN: 9781787698932
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In a time of rapid policy and curriculum change, educators must be knowledge workers who continue to develop professionally. This book offers a critical exploration of how Professional Learning Networks (PLNs) equip educators to work collaboratively to develop their professional practice and be agents of innovation in their field. 

Providing access to six real-life examples of equity-oriented Professional Learning Networks, this book illustrates key attributes that build educators' practice, expertise, and investment in innovation. Crucially, the authors shine a light on the ability of PLNs to address questions of equity, both for educators working in remote and rural communities who have limited access to professional development and other resources, and diverse learners from equity-seeking communities. 

This book is of interest to readers from scholarly, practitioner, and policy backgrounds who want to gain an innovative look at real-life cases to inform current and future equity-oriented PLNs. Readers will discover the importance and potential of centering teachers, students, inquiry, collaboration, and context within educational transformation efforts.

1

EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF PROFESSIONAL LEARNING NETWORKS

Leyton Schnellert

ABSTRACT

In a time of rapid policy and curriculum change, teachers must be knowledge workers who continue to develop professionally. Professional learning networks (PLNs) offer teachers the opportunity to develop professionally by positioning them as inquirers into their own practice and authors and agents of situated innovation. Six examples of PLNs are introduced in this book to illustrate key attributes of PLNs that build educators’ ownership, practice, and expertise. Also highlighted is the potential of PLNs to address questions of equity, both for educators working in remote and rural communities who have limited access to professional development and other resources, and diverse learners and equity-seeking communities (e.g., Indigenous communities, non-dominant cultural groups). Scholar, practitioner, and policy audiences can benefit greatly from the PLNs described here and draw from these case studies to inform equity-oriented PLNs centering the importance of teachers, students, engagement, collaboration, and rural place in educational transformation efforts.

Keywords: Professional learning networks; educational change; equity; rural education; professional development; collaborative professionalism

INTRODUCTION

“Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain” (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p. 1). An overarching problem is that most educational change and professional development opportunities fail to engage educators in generating and mobilizing knowledge about and for practice. Such efforts are still primarily didactic experiences designed for, rather than with, teachers and school leaders. When a school or district moves on to a new goal, the implementation of an innovative approach often becomes shallow or even abandoned due to a lack of investment and ownership on the part of teachers and school leaders. In contrast, collaborative, inquiry-oriented approaches to professional development, such as professional learning networks (PLNs), show potential to build expertise within educators because they hold responsibility for advancing their own knowledge and practice. PLNs are defined as any group who engage in collaborative learning with others outside of their everyday community of practice with the ultimate aim of improving outcomes for children and youth (Brown & Poortman, 2018). PLNs, where educators voluntarily work and learn together, hold the potential to support educators, at scale, to rethink their own practice, create situated evidence-informed innovations, and share their emerging practice and learning with others outside of their daily work context.

PLNs engage teachers and school leaders as collaborative inquirers into their practice, and authors and agents of situated innovations (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Pennington, 2007; Schnellert, Kozak, & Moore, 2015). Emerging research suggests that teachers engaged in collaborative inquiry are more likely to sustain attention to goals, try new ideas, and persist in efforts at innovation (Luna et al., 2004; Morrell, 2004; Schnellert, Fisher, & Sanford, 2018; Timperley, Kaser, & Halbert, 2014). This book offers examples where educators’ co-construction of practice and engagement in knowledge generation and mobilization are built into six existing PLNs.

Collectively, the PLNs introduced in this book embrace educational change as an opportunity to better meet the needs of the learners in their care. Taking up a situated approach, these PLNs and their members inquire into how their students, communities, and contexts offer unique opportunities to recast teaching and learning as responsive pedagogy and develop and grow local innovations. Dumont, Istance, and Benevides (2010) call for learning environment transformation to foster critical skills and competencies of twenty-first century citizens. We need to enable all students to succeed in a world with far reaching technological change and profound transformation from industrial to knowledge economies that require self-directed, lifelong learning. Yet, professional development related to diverse learners often frames children from deficit-based perspectives (Harrower, 1999; Pugach & Warger, 2001; Schnellert et al., 2015). The PLNs in this book counter this narrative by offering examples of educators working to develop responsive practice through embracing their diverse contexts and the equity-seeking students and communities who live and learn there.

So, inquiry-based networks can foster teachers’ professional learning and practice change, and correspondingly, gains for students (Butler, Schnellert, & Cartier, 2013), but where does an organization and/or a leader begin? Because PLNs are a relatively new field of study (Daly & Stoll, 2018), educational leaders do not have multiple examples at their fingertips to reference as they design their own PLNs. This book offers six examples of PLNs that illustrate key attributes of PLNs that are sustainable over time and build educators’ ownership, practice, and expertise in diverse contexts with diverse learners. These case studies highlight the potential of PLNs to address questions of equity – both for educators (i.e., teachers working in remote and rural communities who have limited access to professional development and other resources) and equity-seeking communities (e.g., Indigenous communities, non-dominant cultural groups).

EQUITY-ORIENTED PLNS

PLN studies have tended to focus on developing shared practices that often unintentionally continue to value dominant ways of knowing and being that almost entirely exclude equity-seeking communities as knowledgeable collaborators in curriculum change efforts (Davidson & Schnellert, 2020; Schnellert et al., 2015); this is problematic. Many educators continue to struggle in their attempts to integrate relational and culturally responsive pedagogies into their teaching, despite countless professional development initiatives to help them develop, change, and evolve their pedagogy. Specifically, research is urgently needed into how to better support educators to decenter dominant ways of knowing and reconceptualize teaching and student success. To achieve this, we must collaborate with equity-seeking community partners within PLNs to support pedagogical transformation, and ultimately redefine student success. However, questions about how PLNs can best support teacher professional development that takes up non-dominant perspectives and decolonizing pedagogies remain. Research in this area has yet to focus on the generative potential of PLNs in supporting educators to work with Indigenous and other equity-seeking community partners and researchers to generate practices that draw from local ways of knowing and being. In Chapter 2, Washington and O’Connor contribute to this conversation by investigating whether and how PLNs can spur pedagogical innovation, particularly for educators in rural communities seeking to take up culturally responsive practices.

Washington and O’Connor illustrate how educators at multiple levels are committed to serving all children, and especially those who are marginalized, by providing them with an excellent and more holistic education. They explain how collaborative professionalism is one way to pursue this work, emphasizing collective responsibility and student and teacher empowerment through PLNs to work for change. The collaborative professionalism model incorporates elements of culture and context, as well, to ensure that collaboration is responsive to the community it is intended to partner with and serve (Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2018). One PLN they studied works to address student well-being and learning, particularly for Indigenous students who have been historically marginalized. These educators use student identity and interest to connect elements like students’ Indigenous backgrounds and cultural practices and their love for outdoor learning to enhance the curriculum and student engagement to improve schools and the overall district school board. This chapter offers examples for how collaboration and PLNs can be utilized to enhance teaching and learning for all teachers and students across cultures and contexts.

In Chapter 3, McGregor, Halbert, and Kaser’s Inquiring Districts PLN, uses the spirals of inquiry (Halbert & Kaser, 2013) an inquiry- and evidence-based approach to learning and teaching – one that focuses on making the education system more equitable through the provision of high-quality learning opportunities for all young people. A distinctive feature of this approach is a focus on understanding the perspectives and experiences of learners – with an emphasis on deliberately seeking student input to design more powerful learning experiences. Their spirals of inquiry include six iterative phases: scanning, focusing, developing a hunch, new learning, taking action, and checking. The authors explain how using this process helped school district employees become increasingly committed to improving the success of their Indigenous learners. After examining graduation rates, school district employees, and the community realized how underserved their Indigenous students were by existing programs and support systems.

Equity-oriented PLNs can help to disrupt education systems that continue to value and promote school success based on colonial and industrial ways of knowing and learning (Schnellert, 2020). Education transformation requires educators, schools, and systems to critique traditional conceptions of and approaches to education, especially those that take up a deficit perspective toward students with cultural, cognitive, and socioeconomic diversity. This deficit orientation to diverse learners fails to recognize their funds of knowledge and does not offer them opportunities to be authors of their own learning and change makers in line with twenty-first century conceptions of teaching and learning. An equity stance invites reflexivity and critical reflection as part of education change network activities (Schnellert et al., 2015). Together PLN members examine their practice and network activities using the places, cultures, and knowledges of educators, and their students and families. Centering non-dominant perspectives acts as a way to disrupt normative practices and opens up spaces for learning with and from equity-seeking communities.

RURAL PLNS

Undertaking professional collaboration to improve instructional practice and spur and sustain innovation is particularly challenging for teachers in rural schools because of geographical isolation and a shortage of like peers (i.e., content or grade level) (Battelle for Kids, 2016). Hargreaves, Parsley, and Cox (2015) suggest that PLN structures and design empower rural teachers to connect to support student engagement and learning, while addressing obstacles to collaboration. Chapters 2–5 illustrate how network structures hold potential to promote teacher empowerment and student engagement in rural spaces – topics often overlooked in educational research (Azano, 2015; Kannapel & DeYoung, 1999).

In Chapter 5, Kim and Martin illustrate how through intentional design for deeper collaborative work and face-to-face connection, PLN members built rel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Exploring The Potential of Professional Learning Networks
• 2. Collaborative Professionalism Across Cultures and Contexts: Cases of Professional Learning Networks Enhancing Teaching and Learning in Canada and Colombia
• 3. Professional Learning Networks Among District Leaders: Advancing Collective Expertise and Leadership for Learning
• 4. Tracing Cycles of Teachers’ Self- and Co-Regulated Practice within a Professional Learning Network
• 5. How Rural Educators Improve Professional Capital in a Blended Professional Learning Network
• 6. Growing the Top: Examining a Mentor–Coach Professional Learning Network
• 7. Shifting Our Gaze: Relational Space in Professional Learning Network Research
• Index