Professional Learning Communities are important to introduce new initiatives and bring about change within a school. How a school leader ensures that this change is sustainable, deep lasting and genuinely staff-led is a greater challenge than the introduction of the initiative itself and has the potential for its results to be immensely powerful and far reaching.
This paper draws on the experiences of educational leaders at the British School of Brussels (BSB) who have created, lead, and sustained an effective whole school PLC for the last 6 years. Since the outset, leaders have intentionally created a whole school Professional Learning Community built on genuine sustained collaboration that enables trusted creativity, purposeful reflection and focused analysis of learning and leadership.
Since 2017, the school has undergone a cultural shift. In terms of PL, we have moved from a sporadic, directed model of PD for teachers, to an ongoing, intrinsically motivated, self-accountable model of PL for all. The PLC model in this setting is a ‘whole school model’ that fosters staff interdependency, self-directed learning and is underpinned by distributed leadership.
Approaching PL in this way has been part of a wider cultural shift. We witness that staff relationships are strong, they feel trusted and supported to approach their learning in creative, collaborative, and welcome peer accountability. Staff purposefully and actively engage to co-create an ethical future-focused vision of education.
This is an effective model. Data collated over time demonstrates a compelling correlation between the PLC ways of working and improved practice and outcomes.
This paper reports on the analysis of qualitative data, viewed through multi-dimensional framework of self, others and organisation. Data is gathered from and triangulated with multiple sources. Additionally, since 2018, BSB has invited the critique of external trusted partners and critical friends who have openly shared their perspectives to our approaches.
In this paper we identify deliberate leadership interventions and exemplify several enabling processes that ensured success. Key learning from our inquiry shows the importance of collaboratively creating and sharing a vision, creating supportive and trusting environments, knowing our staff well, recognising the strengths of each individual, allowing for risk-taking and innovative approaches, building connectivity, providing the resources needed for growth and creating structures and process that sustain a learning culture across the organisation.
We offer here a humanistic and ‘transformational’ leadership model that supports at all levels of the school organisation and deals with the concepts and cultures that matter rather than administrative detail. It is our belief that by getting the culture right, everything will follow.
We recognize that the strength of a PLC lies in understanding the context and nuance of each setting, but we aim that by sharing our examples, along with the wider theoretical framework, that we will empower other schools to enact genuine deep and lasting change in line with the ICSEI 2024 theme: ‘Quality Professional Education for Enhanced School Effectiveness and Improvement.’