Professional learning community

A professional learning community (PLC) is a method to foster collaborative learning among colleagues within a particular work environment or field. It is often used in schools as a way to organize teachers into working groups of practice-based professional learning. The phrase professional learning community began to be used in the 1990s after Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline (1990) had popularized the idea of learning organizations, related to the idea of reflective practice espoused by Donald Schön in books such as The Reflective Turn: Case Studies in and on Educational Practice (1991). Charles B. Myers and Lynn K. Myers used the phrase professional learning community in relation to schools in their 1995 book The Professional Educator: A New Introduction to Teaching and Schools, and a year later Charles B. Myers presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association titled "Beyond the PDS: Schools as Professional Learning Communities" that proposed a path from professional development school (PDS) efforts to schools as professional learning communities. In 1997, Shirley M. Hord issued a white paper titled "Professional Learning Communities: Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement". A year later, Richard DuFour and Robert E. Eaker published the book Professional Learning Communities at Work. Since the late 1990s, a large literature on PLCs has been published. PLCs have many variations. In Shirley M. Hord's 1997 definition, it means "extending classroom practice into the community; bringing community personnel into the school to enhance the curriculum and learning tasks for students; or engaging students, teachers, and administrators simultaneously in learning". Hord noted that the benefits of professional learning community to educators and students include reduced isolation of teachers, better informed and committed teachers, and academic gains for students. In 1998, Richard DuFour and Robert E.