BUILDING LEARNING COMMUNITIES

If you dream it, you can do it.

Walt Disney

I can think of nothing so conspicuously missing in the effort to improve our schools as the continuous engagement of teachers and principals in constructing visions. The Old Testament tells us that people without a vision will perish. Without a vision school people will continue to favor whatever action promises to extinguish a fire more quickly ‑ so that they can move on to the next fire.

Roland Barth, Improving Schools From Within. 1990

Do not act unless you can study what you act. It is irresponsible for a school to mobilize, initiate, and act without any conscious way of determining whether such expenditure of time and energy is having a desirable effect...To study without acting gets a school nowhere; to act without study gets a school somewhere ‑ lost.

Carl Glickman, Renewing American Schools, 1993

The purpose of staff development is not just to implement isolated instructional innovations; its central purpose is to build strong collaborative work cultures that will develop the long‑term capacity for change.

Michael Fullan, 1991

Schools must start engaging themselves in a conversation about what it means to be an educated person. What we will be doing is inducting kids into an intellectual conversation, a discussion about what we want the world to be like in the future. It is the most important discussion we can have.

The problem with a lot of reformers is that they believe it can be achieved by group sanity.

George Bernard Shaw

The issue is creating multiple discourse communities for educators....Keeping the environment reeking with rich ideas, keeping it stoked, keeping learning opportunities in the water supply.

Milbrey McLaughlin, 1994

The most important vehicle for maintaining an organization and creating a notion of change is to encourage conversation.

Deborah Meter, 1994

The single most strategic unit for change is the individual school.

J. Goodlad, 1984

You can't move anywhere unless you've educated yourself about alternatives...A vision doesn't occur in a void. You've got to look at multiple perspectives and multiple possibilities.

Jean Smart, High School Teacher, 1992