Building a learning community of senior staff.

One of the current education "buzz phrases" speaks to the creation of professional learning communities to build the capacity of staff. The idea of learning organizations is not new. Peter Senge's 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, describes learning organizations "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together."

Now more commonly known in K-12 education as professional learning communities, these groups are characterized as teachers and administrators who continuously seek and share learning and then act on what they learn.

Executive Learning

For the past several years, the Norfolk, Va., Public Schools' Leadership Learning Team has convened for two to three hours at least once a month to engage in professional development activities. The group's original composition was 10 senior administrators in the school district. We have since expanded to 16 members, including the superintendent, chief academic officer, chief finance officer, chief operations officer and a number of senior directors who supervise departments as diverse as human resources, media relations, transportation, budget and staff development.

The purposes of the team are to learn together to create a sense of community, to overcome a "silo" mindset brought about by specializations in the central office, to create bonds tying together a special group with a shared set of ideas and to provide a culture of caring, respect and trust among members.

The Leadership Learning Team began meeting about five years ago and resulted from a partnership with the Panasonic Foundation. The foundation provided meeting facilitators who helped us mold the group's work. The first year was a trial-and-error exercise where we moved rapidly from subject to subject, issue to issue, with little resolution or feeling of closure on any topic or issue. We read and discussed articles about leadership, discussed hot topics of the district and talked about the work of the district.

We became more literature driven the second year as we read and discussed several books, including best sellers Good to Great, The Tipping Point and Execution. However, there was little depth or breadth to these discussions and there was a definite lack of application to the work of Norfolk Public Schools.

Applied Meaning

This lack of purpose in application led to a significant change for year 3. We agreed to spend the entire year reading, discussing and applying knowledge learned from Good to Great by Jim Collins. The team agreed that our purpose was to build capacity and to learn. No operational, day-to-day routine work was to be discussed at these sessions.

We organized sessions by having one or two members teach a particular chapter. The lesson was not only to give an in-depth look at Collins' message, but to apply the meaning to the current work being undertaken in the school system. This allowed all team members the opportunity to champion a chapter and helped all of us recall the difficulty in planning and implementing a successful lesson. There is a definite heightened sense of urgency about the quality of planning and presenting when you are doing so with peers.

Concentrating on applying the lessons learned from a single book to the work of the school district gave focus and meaning to the work of the team.

Building on the success of work on Good to Great, the team moved on to The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton during the past year. This book supplemented our efforts on closing the achievement gap by helping us learn how to turn knowledge into action. Again, each member of the team selected a chapter to teach.

One change was the addition of six new members to the team. We also opted to no longer use our Panasonic facilitators for these sessions. Adding additional persons allowed more diverse views to be expressed and enabled us to see the will of the group even if one of us might oppose it.

We have become an executive professional learning community that helps move the work of the district forward. The language of the literature we studied now permeates the organization and often you will hear a Leadership Learning Team member refer to concepts we studied when they are making a key decision. We are building the leadership capacity of our executive staff through a strategy that has proved of great benefit at relatively little cost.

Denise Schnitzer, who retired in August as interim superintendent of the Norfolk, Va., Public Schools, can be reached c/o Maury High School, 322 Shirley Ave., Norfolk, VA 23517. E-mail: [e-mail]