¶ … Professional Learning Community within an Educational Context
Peter Senge's learning community is one where all of the team members work together within in a fluid, supportive atmosphere that is future based and oriented around critical, open thinking.
His five principles of learning communities are:
Systems thinking -- namely seeing a problem in terms of its long-term holistic perspective and ramifications. Seeing different connections among the problem or studied material
Personal mastery -- includes characteristics such as commitment to truth, creativity, personal vision, and persistence
Mental models -- we each see in terms of certain heuristics. Interpretations of the world. Openness towards differences of these mental models and willingness to change them are characteristics of a viable learning community.
Building shared vision -- where the team works towards a shared goal.
Team learning -- an interaction where all are open to learning with and from the other
Senge's learning community was formed in reference to organizations and managers. Much of the focus of his work was with the business leader in mind.
Sergiovanni's (1994) work, on the other hand,...
The term 'community', he argues, is trite and should be rather formulated to refer to one where a set of single individuals are recombined from an entity of individual 'I's to a constructive whole of 'we'. In this unity of 'we' (the I-thou of Buber indicating fusion rather than an I-It of separateness), values, beliefs, practices, and ways of thinking are informed and reformed into different and reinforced wholes. The learning community becomes one of a tightly knit learning structure or group where learning can take on more of a meaningful support in the environment of a cohesive and supportive whole.
Munro (n.d.) extends his learning community from a group of individuals to that of the school as a whole. He recommends that for optimum learning or pedagogical instruction to occur in a school, three sorts of capital have to be utilized and these in turn are:
Intellectual capital -- the intellectual knowledge of the school. To mobilize and collate that base in order to generate effective individual learning
Social capital- the level of belief that the community has…
