Professional Learning Communities

These books and articles can provide insight and information for forming and sustaining professional learning communities.

Learning Communities and Team Skills

This collection of tools and articles from the National Staff Development Council emphasizes the value of effective collaboration and contains information about building productive teams.

Learning Together, Leading Together: Changing Schools Through Professional Learning Communities

This volume by Shirley Hord clearly defines the professional learning community. Hord offers practical advice, identifies the benefits that accrue to staff and students, and outlines the strategies required to launch, develop, and sustain a community of professional learners that promote student learning.

National Staff Development Council's Standards for Staff Development, Revised

This book focuses on what it takes to construct high-quality professional development that leads to higher student performance and on conditions under which educators can get the most out of their learning experiences. Professional Learning Communities and Collaboration are featured in this book.

Professional Learning Communities: Communities of Continuous Inquiry and Improvement

In this online book, Shirley Hord examines literature on Professional Learning Communities to determine what professional learning communities look like and how they function, why they are important for both staff and students, and how such learning communities are introduced and developed in schools as a new organizational arrangement.

Professional Learning Community

This article by Rick DuFour explains the characteristics of Professional Learning Communities and how they operate.

Support for Professional Learning Teams

This site continually updates tips, tools, and information for use with A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams

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Reflective Teaching

Action Research: Facilitator's Handbook

This handbook by Cathy Caro-Bruce provides an excellent "roadmap for action research facilitators to help groups" and includes quotations, handouts, strategies, resources, and insights from a number of widely experienced action-research teachers.

Classroom Action Research: The Nature and Impact of an Action Research Professional Development Program in One Urban School District

This is an excellent examination of the nuts-and-bolts of action research in a school district (Madison, Wisconsin) where it has been integrated successfully for many years.

Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher-researchers

This book by Ruth Shagoury Hubbard and Brenda Miller Power is filled with "essays written by teacher researchers, data samples, field notes, and self-reflections" and is a rich source of practical information from the practitioner's point of view.

Moving from Professional Talk to Teacher Research. Proceedings of the 2000 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting

This proceedings chapter from this document is especially useful for administrators interested in action research.

Networks: An On-line Journal for Teacher Research

This website is a seminal location for ongoing publications related to action research. It covers both the theoretical and the practical from many perspectives, including those of university professors and K–12 classroom teachers.

What Are the Conditions That Sustain Teacher Research? Proceedings of the 2000 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting

This article focuses on an action-research model of professional development at Highland Park (Illinois) High School.

Where do the Mermaids Stand?: Teacher Research as Professional Development at the School Level. Proceedings of the 1996 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting

This proceedings chapter examines how an entire school staff can reconceptualize professional development as teacher research.

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