Are Professional Learning Communities the Future of Education?

[Brad Fox]

I believe that distributed professional learning communities will be the next major frontier in education. Because of the complexity, size and growth of the emerging global knowledge base, individual solutions to market, ecological, political, economic, health and other critical problems will require the best combined thought of socially interactive thinkers. Problems are going to be too big and developing too fast for individual researchers to solve. Some of the most advanced manufacturers (Toyota) and scientific research projects (human genome project, space exploration, brain mapping) are relying heavily on a community approach to learning, innovating and producing.
Will Ricardson (2009) gives a provocative description of the actions of a learning community, or network as he calls it. “You can almost visualize this network of individual nodes of people, connected by ideas and passions, constantly shifting and changing as new connections are found and old ones are reconsidered” he says. As a biologist, professional learning communities remind me of the learning, reorganization and development of neural networks in the brain as described by Doidge (2007). Reviewing the literature of brain structure and function in brain-damaged patients, he revealed that neuroscience has now begun to repudiate the former view of brain structure as fixed, and now sees neural networks as remarkably plastic and renewable. Verified first by microscopic nerve network changes in learning rats, and now by brain micromapping of the neocortex in monkeys and humans, it is apparent that neurons now have a complementary developmental effect upon one another. Doidge’s (2007) statement that “nerves that fire together, wire together” makes me think of the interactions that individuals in learning networks have with each other and how these interactions can wither or strengthen as they are abandoned or used. The “wiring together” phenomenon is important because strengthened neural (and hopefully learner) networks tend to be more efficient and reliable for the task they are dedicated to.

Doidge, N. (2007) The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books, New York.

Richardson, W. (2009) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.