A community of equals: The building of a professional learning community in a pre-school

Abstract

In the school improvement literature there seems to be a unanimous emphasis that schools need to improve from within and the improvement efforts have to reach beyond mere structural reform and be aimed at teaching and the learning experiences of children. In recent years the notion of professional learning communities has also become a common theme in the school improvement discourse, as a way of building schools’ internal capacity to implement and sustain change. The idea of professional learning communities is rooted in the idea that teachers need to reflect, research and create knowledge about their own practice, while at the heart of the concept is the notion of community, relationships, interdependent responsibility and shared values and vision. This article reports action research on the building of a professional learning community in Bjarmi, a new infant preschool that builds on the philosophy of Reggio Emilia. As a framework for the school’s development work the school improvement model of “school intelligences”, introduced by MacGilchrist et al. (2004) was chosen. The framework describes professional learning communities as consisting of nine intelligences. The intelligences refer both to values, knowledge and ways of working that are characteristic for a learning school community. The intelligences can be divided into three subsets: First, ethical and spiritual intelligences that represent the values and vision of the school community; second, systemic intelligence that ensures the interrelationships and connections between the various parts of the organisation; and finally: contextual, operational, emotional, collegial, reflective and pedagogical intelligences that all relate to how the values and vision of the school are reflected in the ways of working within the school. This framework caught the attention of the researchers for several reasons: For being unconnected to school levels and therefore well suited as a development framework for a pre-school; for not having preset fixed definitions of the intelligences, and thereby allowing the school to put its own touch on them; and finally for introducing what the researchers saw as a viable roadmap to fulfil the aims of the school to build a professional learning community that honoured the principles of Reggio Emilia. Method The research took place during the school year 2008–2009, the first year of the school’s operation, and the principal researcher was the head teacher of the school. Data was collected from briefing sheets, interviews with teachers and parents, recordings of staff meetings, research diaries and results of staff development activities. Finally, a group of three critical friends, two of whom were from outside the school, Abstract A community of equals: The building of a professional learning community in a pre-school 57 Samfélag jafningja: Uppbygging lærdómssamfélags í leikskóla worked with the researcher throughout the research period. This group, with additional members both from inside and outside the school, formed a validation group to critique the findings. Findings and conclusions The findings indicated that the framework of school intelligences was a useful tool to build a learning community in line with the Reggio Emilia approach. The teachers’ participation in reflection, discussion and teamwork, along with the emphasis of the school´s leaders on distributed leadership, mutual responsibility, trust, attentiveness and respect, supported their professional growth and joined them as a community of professional learners. The teachers ended their first school year together, with the common feeling that despite different backgrounds, experience and education the school community had enabled them to grow together as a community of equals. However, this achievement did not come about without effort. The school encountered many obstacles, commonly described in the school improvement literature, such as professional disagreements blended with emotions, lack of experience, knowledge and understanding, diverse values, and implementation dips. It also needs to be acknowledged that the span of the research was only one school year and one action research cycle. More intelligences are still to be introduced and the school’s achievement so far has to be sustained. Furthermore the findings of this research relate to one school and cannot be “transplanted“ to other schools without adaptation. Having struck these precautionary notes, the main finding of the utility of the framework remains, and the adaptation of the framework that was the subject of the research is a contribution to knowledge about the building of professional learning communities in Icelandic pre-schools.