Two Professional Learning Community Camps: Differing Opportunities

One of the newest ideas du jour is the idea of the Professional Learning Community (PLC). Since the late 1990s, schools across the Southwest and the Heartland have been embracing the concept of the PLC at a fever pitch. Marketing materials and more recently empirical reports are beginning to surface describing what this concept is and how effective it is. It is certainly a concept related to many others that have come before. However, the literature on the idea of the PLC shows it to be something new and never really truly holistically explained in the past. Two camps have arisen to explain this concept. One concentrates on the community aspect of the PLC and the other concentrates on the learning aspect. Opportunities are offered to educators to take ownership of their practice and to students in having their educational needs truly met based on data. Educational administrators seeking to implement or support such an effort on their campus should have an understanding of the literature differences of the two camps or they might implement something other than a PLC based on the literature