By Kevin Fahey
There is a lot of talk about “learning communities” in schools and school districts. Some communities are “professional;” some are “purposeful”; others are “communities of practice.” There is a lot of talk and lots of different (and often confusing) language.
The SRI mission statement states we are committed to “building transformational learning communities that are fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence.” Transformational learning communities are places where educators improve their practice, but also expose, explore and even transform fundamental assumptions about students, excellence in schools, and equitable educational practice. They are places where educators, “examine their beliefs and question how these beliefs are enacted in their practice (SRI Guiding Principle).”
However, as I have talked or written about the SRI mission, I have often wondered if a there is a word that is missing. For me, that missing word is “intentional.” Like many SRI affiliates, much of my work has centered around helping educators have a different type of conversation: using, for example, the Collaborative Assessment Conference to dig deeply into student work or the Tuning Protocol to improve a lesson or assessment. For the most part, this has been good work and helped educators (I hope) become more collaborative, reflective, and focused on issues of teaching and learning, and even improve their practices.
However, was the work transformational? Did it support teachers and administrators “working in ways that challenge each other’s assumptions about educational excellence and equity (SRI Guiding Principle)?” Did it build capacity for “working with determination to ensure equal access to quality learning in a way that achieves equitable outcomes for each student (SRI Guiding Principle)?” My best guess is that in some cases individuals and groups moved toward becoming transformational learning communities while others did not. However my honest answer is, “Mostly, I don’t know because I was not being intentional in setting this as my purpose or goal.” I was not really paying attention to the goal of helping the school build a transformational learning community committed to equity and excellence.
It seems that we will never build transformational learning communities unless we are relentlessly intentional about this goal. In my case, being more intentional might not have changed what I did with a particular group on a particular day. If a group is struggling to be together to share student work, than that’s what they need to do. Group learning can’t be rushed. However, being more intentional might compel me to re-frame my thinking about the focus and purpose of my work. I would still help the group learn the CAC, but I would also ask the group to pay more attention to who students are, and how who they are connects to the assignment and their responses to it. I would need to constantly attend to getting to deeper, more challenging transformational learning.
The point is that becoming a transformational learning community is so difficult that it will not easily ever happen. Yet for reasons of educational equity and excellence it is important that it does happen. Maybe the next version of the SRI mission will talk about learning communities that are intentionally transformational.” But maybe we don’t need to talk about being intentional; maybe we just need to be intentional.
Connect with Kevin Fahey at kfayhey@schoolreforminitiative.org
