What Is A Professional Learning Community?

The concept of a professional learning community, perhaps most ubiquitously understood at present within the framework proposed by Richard Dufour and Robert Eaker (1998), has captured the collective imagination of North American educators with its promise of fundamentally altering teaching, learning, and the bureaucracy and individualism that pervade so many schools. In Alberta, many current school improvement projects receiving envelope funding from the provincial government through the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) outline long-term plans to develop professional learning communities in individual schools and/or across districts. Sergiovanni (2000) represents the agreement that strong and purposeful community is critical to school effectiveness when he states, “developing a community of practice may be the single most important way to improve a school ” (p. 139)