TPE F

Richard DuFour's article, "What is a "Professional Learning Community"? explores collective systems teachers can use to raise the quality of the education offered in the classroom and build lasting effective communities that produce quality education. This model of collectivity, offers advocating mutual support systems, spaces of criticisms, and mediums for growth. Teachers often are thrown into their classroom with little support. How do teachers reach such ambitious goals in isolation? The starting point for such professional communities is how one judges "their effectiveness on the basis of results" and "[every] teacher team participates in an ongoing process." With such goals attained, the "team goals shifts" according to Dufour. Such perspective seems sound, but in real situations, schools are getting gutted through a downward spiral of reduced funding. Such teams will have difficult decisions to make based on the limits of aggregate labor output. Being conscious of such limitations, and dealing with the objective work load, what specific work should be prioritized? And as school budgets decline, objective workloads increase, and having time and energy in fostering professional collective development becomes a task that becomes very uphill.