I bought some Girl Scout cookies recently and did some grocery shopping at the same time. As I rolled my cart up and down the aisles, I couldn’t help but notice the group of Girl Scouts and how they were working together. It seemed like all of them, eight or nine in number, understood what their goals were for the day, what each of them needed to do to reach those goals, how success would be assessed, and how they would support each other in case one of them encountered difficulty and struggle.
Yesterday I shared a column written by Lawrence Kohn, co-founder and partner at Leadership Partners, a Houston-based group committed to helping schools improve their performance. Kohn’s article focused on Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), or the ability for adult learning leaders to work on common goals, instructional strategies, learning assessment, and re-teaching intervention together. I asked the question if it was time to stop working with adult learning leaders to build PLCs and start supporting young learners as they attempt to build a Professional Learning Community for themselves?
When my wife read yesterday’s column, she asked me a good question:
What makes us think kids would be better at building learning communities when even well-meaning adults have been unable to do it?
She went on to say that she thought kids have even less sense of the value of community, they are by nature more self-focused, and focusing on individualized learning doesn’t seem like that will drive them toward learning community principles.
It’s not as if adults haven’t been able to build professional learning communities. We see PLCs in all types of workspaces – emergency rooms, professional sports teams, air traffic control centers, graduate student cohorts, and even some public schools. When I was a middle school and high school principal, I think we built successful professional learning communities in both schools. It wasn’t easy to create, and it sure wasn’t easy to keep our PLC going once started, but most adult learning leaders I worked with showed a commitment to allow the three questions –
What do we want them to learn?
How will we know that they have learned it?
And, what will we do if they don’t learn it? –
to drive our daily activities as teachers, administrators, and staff.
But can young learners demonstrate these same behaviors while prioritizing their own individualized learning? I think so.
If we change the three questions above a bit, then I think we can get to a place where learning is not only individual, but it’s collective:
What do I want to learn?
What do I want to learn with others?
How will I know that I’ve learned whatever it is I or we want to learn?
And, what will I or we do when I’m not learning or we aren’t learning what I/we need to learn?
Building a professional learning community in a group of young learners allows for those young learners to learn how to define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning, but also the collective learning each young learner commits to as a member of a PLC.
When we launched our personalized learning lab space almost 10 years ago now, we saw young learners show interest in their own individual learning. But we also saw young learners become interested in supporting other young learners with their learning.
One example of support was the creation of “learning captains” within the larger group of young learners. What the lab school’s adult learning leaders found out was that each young learner possessed a strength that was needed by other young learners inside the lab. Young learners served as “captains” of math, literacy, science, history. But others served as “captains” for wellness, creative writing, and music appreciation.
“Learning captains” hosted “learning huddles” for their fellow young learners. “Learning huddles” were spaces where the “learning captain,” with expertise in something others wanted to learn, led question and answer sessions, discussions, or sometimes a direct instructional piece to help other young learners with their learning. At the beginning, the adult learning leader offered support to these “learning captains,” but as time moved on, young learners were able to lead their “learning huddles” on their own.
Given the present structure of a traditional school, my wife might be right in questioning whether a PLC, made up of young learners, could be a viable option.
But, given the example of our personalized learning lab, it’s clear that, given a young learner cohort of 50 or so, you can build a PLC that not only supports individual learning goals, but group learning goals at the same time.
It just seems that in building a professional learning community for adults, we might be wasting our time. It seems that the ones that could really benefit from their own PLC would be the young learners themselves. The adult learning leaders could play a role in the young learner PLC, but the young learners would be the owners.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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