Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind act, the movement toward education reform has been put into high gear. Administrators all over the country are looking for ways to improve their test scores and school ranks. The current trend of professional learning communities, or teams depending on the district, goes back to an old practice with a twist.

The professional learning communities idea has been popularized by Dr. Richard Dufour. The concept is that teachers that teach the same course in a given school collaborate frequently on what they are teaching and how it is going to be assessed. Collaboration is nothing new to many educators. Sharing ideas and resources has always taken place. The professional learning communities formalize the process a little more, and hopefully provide a consistent time for the collaboration to take place.

The modern twist is the assessment piece. Common assessments based on a shared goal are used to measure student progress. By giving common assessments teachers can compare results and make adjustments to help more students become successful in the class.

Like any system, professional learning communities have their advantages and disadvantages. Time is always an issue for teachers. Anything that helps teacher find time to help one another is beneficial. It makes sense that common classes taught by different teachers need to be similar. The content covered should be the same, and in my experience, is more than it is not. Of course, it is impossible to cover everything in any class. Hard decisions and compromises need to be made.

The concept of common assessments has advantages. Teachers can see if one class did better on a particular section than another and try to figure out why. Unfortunately, the easiest way to gather data to analyze is by using multiple choice, or some other easily graded and recorded assessment. This makes the data collected suspect. Just because a student did not get a question correct does not mean they did not know it. The question may have been worded poorly or the possible answers confusing. Hopefully these problems would be addressed by the professional learning community.

Not all common assessments need to be standardized type questions. Essay questions can be the same and the responses compared based on a common rubric. This should help identify writing practices that need to be addressed, making the students better writers.

Professional learning communities have been challenged as a way to eliminate teacher's academic freedom. This may be some what true, although not entirely bad. If used correctly professional learning communities can be a much more positive tool for teachers than a hindrance.