Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, Issue #19, February 24, 2001. © by CJEAP and the author(s).

BUILDING CAPACITY FOR A LEARNING COMMUNITY

by Coral Mitchell,
Faculty of Education, Brock University
and Larry Sackney,
Department of Educational Administration, University of Saskatchewan

Since the early days of the 20th century, schools and educators have been subjected to
numerous calls for improvement of their performance. A curious aspect of this phenomenon
is that school-based educators (teachers and school administrators alike) have usually been
positioned as objects to be manipulated and controlled rather than as professional creators
of a learning culture. In recent years, however, this position has lost considerable credibility
because school-based educators are exactly the people who deal directly with the learning
of children. From that standpoint, scholars and change agents have begun to advance the
notion of the learning community as a preferred strategy for school improvement.

The metaphor of the learning community assumes, first, that schools are expected to
facilitate the learning of all individuals, and, second, that educators are ideally positioned to
address fundamental issues and concerns in relation to learning. Within this metaphor,
school people are central to questions of educational practice, change, and improvement;
they are the ones charged with the tasks of identifying and confronting the problems and
mysteries of professional practices. But simply charging them with this responsibility will not
necessarily bring about the types of profound improvement that are envisioned within a
learning community. Instead, capacity for a learning community needs deliberately and
explicitly to be built among educators and within schools and school systems.

In this paper, we present a model that frames our understandings about the ways in which
people can construct a learning community. The model consists of three pivotal capacities
that we believe need to be built if a school is to function as a learning community: personal
capacity, interpersonal capacity, and organizational capacity. In a recently published book
(Mitchell & Sackney, 2000), we provided a fuller development of the model and we
embedded it in data from several studies and projects that we have undertaken over the
past decade. In this paper, we present a summarized version of the model and of our
foundational assumptions.

Underpinnings of the Learning Community

According to Bohm (1980), Newtonian science has bequeathed a view of the world as a
gigantic clockwork with reality being made up of discrete parts, each with its individual
structure and function. Understanding this reality entails breaking systems and units into
their constituent sub-units and analyzing their distinct elements. Bohm argues that this
worldview is inadequate to account for the intricacies and interconnections of complex living
and social systems. Instead, he proposes a wholeness model of reality, in which the
perceived parts are not at all separate from one another but are unique manifestations and
diverse expressions of one complete entity. Understanding this reality entails considering
the interconnections, mutual influences, and dynamic relationships that ebb and flow among
the elements of a particular system. We believe that most contemporary school systems
reflect the Newtonian worldview, but building a learning community requires a shift of
perception to the Bohmian view. We also believe, along with others (e.g., O'Sullivan, 1999),
that a new educational order is indeed emerging to reflect this shift in perception. One
manifestation of this shift is the recent interest in learning communities.

Our interest in this phenomenon arose from the attention in the business and educational
sectors to the notion of the learning organization. Over the past decade, our understanding
of the concept has moved from thinking about schools as learning organizations to thinking
about them as learning communities. The two terms, although similar, are not synonymous.
At the risk of sounding somewhat simplistic, we believe that the key difference lies in the
definition of ends and means. In a learning organization, the ends of importance are
organizational growth, productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. The means are the people
and the learning that they do in support of organizational goals. The goals are established
by the gatekeepers of the organization, and learning is a tool to support organizational
processes and efficiencies. Sense is meaningful if it contributes to the growth of the
organization. By contrast, in a learning community, the ends of importance are the growth
and development of the people. The means are the ways in which community members
work and learn together. The goals are set through intensive and ongoing negotiation and
discourse within the community, and learning is a natural process that is grounded in the
realities and perplexities of human lives. Sense is meaningful if it makes sense to the
members of the community, and there are likely to be multiple "senses" co-existing
peacefully (or not). A key assumption is that the learning community is concerned with the
human experience whereas the learning organization is concerned with organizational
productivity. From our perspective, the ideas associated with a learning community more
closely reflect the kinds of conditions we think are appropriate for schools.

Although there have been some problems with defining a learning community (Beck, 1999),
we have noted some points of convergence in the definitional literature. First, communities
entail some sort of ëglue' that holds the members together, whether that is shared vision,
common understandings, a common goal, or something else. Second, members are in close
contact and communication with one another. That is, a community in schools consists at
least partially in pervasive values, enduring commitments, a sense of belonging, a sense of
togetherness, and caring interactions among and between teachers, staff members,
administrators, students, and parents (Beck & Foster, 1999). In a learning community, each
individual works with others in a spirit of experimentation and risk taking to improve the
educational experience of all individuals in the school. This is the task component.
Furthermore, each person deserves the support and care of other school members, and
people come together in a spirit of trust and mutual respect. This is the affective
component. The conjunction of the cognitive and affective aspects adds heart and passion
to the work of teachers and students alike.

Within a learning community, the learning of the teachers is as important as the learning of
the children. Professional learning, however, is not an easy beast to tame, and the
paradoxical and complex nature of education endows professional development with both
promise and peril (Bredeson, 1999). The complexity is evident, for example, in Gherardi's
(1999) distinction between learning in pursuit of problem solving and learning in the face of
mystery. The first is more instrumental and cognitive, the second more natural and
intuitive. In her words, "Problem-driven learning was propelled by the aesthetic of the
rational, while mystery-driven learning is sustained by the aesthetic of the relational" (p.
117). Gherardi claims that, when professional learning is linked exclusively to problem
solving and is pushed by institutional expectations, it loses its connection with the lives of
the professionals and runs the risk of being unnatural and ineffective. By contrast, when
learning is linked to the mysteries and perplexities faced by the professionals, it is
embedded in the day-to-day context of the people and is more natural, effective, and
durable. Gherardi's (1999) point is that professional learning happens all the time, but
whether that learning leads to improved practice will depend a great deal on the extent to
which the learning has taken place in the face of mystery. Although we agree with this
point, we contend that the problems of practice cannot be ignored. We assume, therefore,
that a learning community consists in a group of people who take an active, reflective,
collaborative, learning-oriented, and growth-promoting approach toward both the mysteries
and the problems of teaching and learning.

Whether or not this kind of learning leads to knowledge that benefits other professionals in
the school depends a great deal on what kind of professional community has been
established within the walls of the school. This notion highlights the social aspect of
professional learning, a phenomenon that has only recently entered the educational
discourse. Stamps (1998), for example, indicates that one of the greatest surprises of
recent years for human resource officers has been the notion of "informal workplace
learning as a social phenomenon: the idea that humans learn within work-based groups
called communities of practice" (p. 36, emphasis in the original). The importance of the
community of practice has found its way into several recent works, including Wenger (1998)
and Sergiovanni (2000). In fact, Sergiovanni positions the community of practice as the
critical element in school development. He contends that "developing a community of
practice may be the single most important way to improve a school" (p. 139). This notion
implies that, just as students learn from and with one another, so too teachers construct
their knowledge not only upon the exemplars that they discover in their own practice but
also upon those that they cull from their colleagues' practices.

The "how"of building a community of practice is, of course, one of the great mysteries of the
entire discourse. One reason for the persistence of this mystery is that, when speaking
about learning communities, scholars often speak about building capacity without
explicating what kind of capacity or capacity for what. That is, there has been insufficient
attention to what Starratt (1999) calls a "curriculum of community" and what we might call
a curriculum of capacity. The model we introduce in this paper constitutes our initial foray
into establishing such a curriculum, which we have constructed around building three pivotal
capacities: personal, interpersonal, and organizational. Building personal capacity entails a
deepand critical deconstruction and reconstruction of one's own professional knowledge.
Interpersonal capacity addresses the development of collegial relations and collective
practices whereby ongoing professional learning becomes a sacred norm within the group.
Organizational capacity means building organizational structures and systems that support
and value personal learning and that facilitate and encouragecollective learning. We explore
each of these capacities in more detail in the next section of this paper.

Building Capacity for a Learning Community

Stamps (1998) argues that the growth and development associated with a learning
community reflects an ecological metaphor where the system is self-regulating and self-
sustaining. He warns, however, that ecosystems are fragile and that certain conditions can
damage the system's ability to thrive or to survive (p. 34). These conditions have only
recently begun to receive some focused attention. For example, Senge, Kleiner, Roberts,
Ross, Roth, and Smith (1999) argue that learning and growth are organic outcomes of both
reinforcing and limiting processes. The authors suggest that the limiting and reinforcing
processes dance through cycles, with growth ebbing and flowing, depending on which
process is ascendant at a particular time. From our standpoint, this ebb and flow moves
through three spheres: the personal, the interpersonal, and the organizational. That is, the
development of a learning community comes about through the interplay among personal
abilities, interpersonal relationships, and organizational structures. Growth occurs as
personal, interpersonal, and organizational capacities increase; it is limited as they
decrease.

Building Personal Capacity

From the perspective of schools, personal capacity is an amalgam of all the embedded
values, assumptions, beliefs, and practical knowledge that teachers carry with them and of
the professional networks and knowledge bases with which they connect. Building personal
capacity entails a confrontation with these explicit and implicit structures in such a way that
teachers come to grips with the personal narratives that shape and constrain their
professional practice and learning. This confrontation is necessary because new learning
always accretes onto prior layers of knowledge and existing belief systems. If these
embedded structures operate out of conscious awareness, then their influence on
professional renewal is not open to scrutiny, and their tacit operation could undermine
professional learning opportunities. Deconstructing the embedded layers frees teachers to
reconstruct their professional narrative in the face of deep mysteries or difficult problems.

The deconstruction process begins with a search for the components of one's professional
narrative. This entails both an internal search (a comprehensive description of one's
professional knowledge, beliefs, practices, assumptions, and values) and an external search
(a description of one's professional networks). The internal search highlights what is already
in the educator's professional repertoire, and the external search indicates the degree to
which the individual has access to new or different professional ideas. With the
deconstruction of the elements of the professional narrative in place, building personal
capacity moves to a deep analysis of the degree of congruence between what Argyris and
Schon (1978) call the espoused theory (what we say we believe or do) and the theory-in-
use (what we actually do). This analysis entails a critical reflection on the relationships
among embedded beliefs, actual practices, and effects of practice. In general, when
unintended effects prevail, there is cause to wonder if the espoused theory is out of
alignment with the theory-in-use. Furthermore, if the unintended effects are causing
problems for one's students, one's colleagues, or one's own learning, this is an indication
that the learning community is in some sort of jeopardy.

This kind of analysis signals what parts of the professional narrative are valid and effective
and what parts are in need of reconstruction. That is, deconstruction is a reflective process
that leads naturally to the active phase of reconstruction. The action heats up when a
particular aspect of the professional narrative appears to be in need of some attention and a
focused learning episode kicks in. This can take the form of planned formal learning,
embedded facilitation, action research, unplanned informal learning, or any other sort of
intervention that leads the individual to new practices, new assumptions, new
understandings, or new ways of confronting teaching and learning. In a learning
community, the reconstruction process emanates from a capacity-building view of
professional learning rather than from a deficit model. Whereas the deficit model sees
knowledge gaps as personal flaws or weaknesses, the capacity-building model sees them as
natural and desirable aspects of a living professional narrative. This model gives educators
voice and visibility in the process of reconstructing their professional knowledge base. They
are the ones who determine the changes that should or could be made, and they are the
ones who direct their own learning process.

Personal capacity consists not just in personal qualities and knowledge bases but also in the
available sources of new knowledge and information. Building personal capacity
consequently entails searching one's professional networks to identify new and different
ideas. Network theory is helpful in this regard. It assumes that individuals' thoughts and
behaviours are at least partly dependent on the ties they establish with other folk in their
social or professional community (Mitchell & Hyle, 1999; Smylie & Hart, 1999). Strong ties
are likely to be forged when individuals spend considerable time together, when they
participate in emotional or deeply engaging activities, when they share common knowledge,
and when they receive mutual rewards. Weak ties, of course, emerge from the opposite
conditions. Network theory suggests that strong ties and homogeneous networks limit the
amount of new information or different ideas to which the members are exposed. For
educators, strong ties are likely to develop between members with similar professional
practices or teaching assignments and in close proximity to one anther. Weak ties, by
contrast, are likely to develop among educators from diverse educational backgrounds or of
diverse professional practices or teaching assignments. Such networks provide a rich source
of new ideas and new possibilities and a foundation for experiments in practice. While
strong ties are necessary for emotional support, weak ties hold the greatest potential for
profound improvement. Taken together, the strong and weak ties of individuals' networks
constitute the contexts within which people develop and extend their professional
narratives.

Personal capacity and professional narratives frame the context of learning, and
reconstructing the professional narrative enables educators to enhance teaching and
learning for themselves and for their students. Teaching and learning are thus closely
interconnected, and we agree with Wineburg and Grossman (1998) that "schools cannot
become exciting places for children until they first become exciting places for adults" (p.
350). This excitement is what brings heart, passion, and emotion into schools and
classrooms. People get passionate about their own ideas, about what they hold near and
dear to themselves. The trick of reconstructing knowledge is to find areas of passion and
then to move deeper into those areas. This means that building personal capacity is a
profoundly personal and potentially transforming phenomenon. As educators come to grips
with the narratives that shape their practice, they gain some sense of mastery over what
they do know and what they need to know. This knowledge empowers them to search for
new knowledge, to reconstruct their professional narrative, and to bring passion back into
education. Without passion, life and learning are routine and sterile; with passion, they are
exciting and meaningful, and knowledge is not simply accumulated but also transformed.

Building Interpersonal Capacity

Building interpersonal capacity shifts the focus from the individual to the group. At the core
of this component lie collegial relations and collective practice. As Stamps (1998) points out,
"Relationships, more than information, they determine how problems get solved or
opportunities exploited" (p. 37). What this signifies is that the construction of professional
knowledge is no longer the solitary pursuit of one individual. Instead, it is a heavily
contested process of negotiation among different people with different knowledge bases,
different histories, different hopes and aspirations, different personal styles and emotions,
and different desires and needs. Under these conditions, the climate within which people
work becomes a concern of deep importance because, over time, educators (and others)
internalize the expectations and norms that have developed within the school. The process
of internalization leads to routinized behaviours as educators come to accept the familiar as
the correct way of behaving. Continuous professional learning will be one of the ëcorrect
ways' in a school that is functioning as a learning community.
In a learning community, where individual and collective learning are deeply embedded in
one another, contradictions and paradoxes (Swieringa & Wierdsma, 1992) are welcome.
Conflict is seen as a challenge to be met rather than as a condition to be avoided. What is
important is not so much the solution to any given problem but consensus about how the
problem should be solved. The learning arises from solving the problem, and different
solutions to the same problem can be found in different contexts and with different group
members. The process of learning also includes an element of unlearning. This too is a
difficult process because so much emotional energy is tied up with what is known and
valued. The contested and emotional nature of learning, then, implies that attention needs
to be paid to the affective and cognitive conditions operating within the school culture.

Building an affective climate entails valuing the contributions of colleagues (affirmation) and
inviting them to be participants (invitation). The first element, affirmation, does not imply
agreement. People can disagree radically on a host of issues, but affirmation means that,
even in the face of deep disagreement, they still acknowledge the values of others' opinions,
ideas, or contributions. When teachers' ideas are given consideration, it affirms them as
professionals and it encourages them to participate in school life. The second element,
invitation, happens when people are explicitly asked to participate. From our standpoint,
invitation is the responsibility of the formal and informal leaders in a school because they
are usually the ones who are the key opinion leaders and they are the ones to whom others
defer. The process of invitation not only brings all people into participation but it also serves
to introduce points of difference that tend to be screened out of the conversation simply
because they stand outside the commonly accepted perspectives. It follows, of course, that
affirmation and invitation rely on a certain degree of trust and that they contribute to the
development of trust among individuals in a learning community.

The affective climate provides the foundation upon which to build a cognitive climate that
supports and encourages individual and collective learning. In a learning community, the
cognitive climate is grounded on social constructivist notions of learning, which position
learning as a process of negotiation among the individuals in a learning community (a
school, a staff, or any other group of people who engage together in a learning enterprise).
From this standpoint, individual learning is rooted in the culture within which the individual
learns, and it is deeply influenced by the dominant metaphors and implicit understandings
that are shared by members of the community. Concepts and ideas must pass both an
individual and a social test (Prawat & Peterson, 1999). Whereas the individual test occurs
during the process of deconstructing the professional narrative, the social test occurs as
group members reflect together on and talk critically about the concepts and ideas. The
processes of collective reflection and professional conversation engage educators in critical
dialogue about the actions, behaviours, craft, and art of professional practice. According to
Isaacs (1999), dialogue includes the skills of listening, respecting, suspending, and voicing.
These skills provide the necessary safety for the deep disclosure and critical talk that
characterize a learning community.

Building interpersonal capacity also involves building a well-functioning team of people who
work and learn together. The development of a collaborative team is supported by a
particular kind of communication that blends advocacy and inquiry. The distinctions and
overlaps between advocacy (the advancement of one's opinion or belief) and inquiry (the
exploration of a colleague's opinion or belief) form a pattern of communication that is
characterized by questions as often as by statements. This pattern allows individuals to
contribute freely without fear of recrimination or reprisal and opens spaces for consideration
of sensitive issues, problems of purpose, and unarticulated dreams or dreads. This kind of
communication allows individuals to engage in collective inquiry and to develop shared
understandings about purposes, values, and commitments and to generate new directions
for professional practice within the school.

Shared understandings and new practices do not emerge immediately or easily. Instead,
they develop through a series of phases that typify team development in many settings. The
first phase, which Isaacs (cited in Senge et al., 1999, p. 362) calls the "crisis of collective
suspension" and which we have labelled "naming and framing" (Mitchell & Sackney, 1998),
affords individuals the time and space to define the context and the working parameters of
some particular issue. In this phase, members ask, "What is the meaning of this?" They
listen not only to others but also to themselves because it is as important for them to
confront their own thoughts as to discover the thoughts of others. Once the team members
develop personal and shared understandings, they enter what Isaacs calls the "crisis of
collective pain" (p. 363), which we have labelled "analyzing and integrating." Here
individuals confront old habits, engage in genuine dialogue, and deconstruct their individual
and group narratives. In the final phase, individuals see themselves as part of a collective
whole and begin to reconstruct professional practice. We have called this phase
"experimenting and applying" because it is here that members find new and creative
solutions to the problems and mysteries that they face.

All of this implies that a learning community asks individuals to build the capacity to work
well with one another. Interpersonal capacity is as much about how people relate to one
another as it is about the dominant normative culture in the school. It is our contention that
a collaborative culture that fosters professional learning is enhanced when certain affective
conditions are in place, when certain cognitive processes occur, and when certain phases
are supported. Our experience with school people suggests that the conditions are
foundational; if they are not in place, the processes are less likely to be successful. The
conditions consequently gain ascendance when there is a need for group maintenance. The
processes gain ascendance when team members focus on a task. The phases gain
ascendance when issues of sustainability emerge. In effect, the recognition that group
processes (as well as group development and group learning) will move cyclically through
these phases lessens the likelihood that people will become discouraged when, for example,
they discover a need to return to the naming and framing phase. Interpersonal capacity
generates a learning power that can lead to increased empowerment and expanded capacity
to improve teaching and learning among all members.

Building Organizational Capacity

Organizational capacity begins with the awareness that structural arrangements can open
doors for teachers and break down walls between them or they can slam doors shut and
keep people away from one another. That is, personal and interpersonal capacity is deeply
affected by the kinds of organizations within which the individuals work. From an
educational perspective, a learning community requires a different kind of organizational
structure than has been the case in most schools. Traditional structures have typically been
characterized by separation of individual administrators, teachers, and students; by uniform
standards, procedures, and expectations; by control of the students' work by teachers and
of the teachers' work by administrators; and by dominance of decision-making by a few
elite individuals. These conditions have served to isolate teachers and students, to minimize
contact among educators, to reduce flexibility and professional discretion, and to engender
defensiveness and resistance among the professional staff (and among students). Such
conditions are not conducive to the creation of a learning community, nor are they likely to
generate profound improvement in teaching and learning.
From a structural standpoint, perhaps the first walls to be breached are those that exist in
the minds of the people. The norms of privacy and individualism, although deeply
entrenched in most schools (Firestone, 1996), do not advance professional learning nor do
they promote profound improvement. For these norms to be overcome, structural
arrangements need to bring individual educators into close professional contact with one
another and to bring the tacit socio-cultural conditions into view. One way to confront the
socio-cultural norms is to place typical interaction patterns at the top of the agenda for a
staff meeting. This arrangement gives members the opportunity to talk openly about how
they perceive and experience the working conditions in the school. If sufficient trust and
critical reflection have developed in the school, the dialogue can open people's eyes to
implicit intentions and unintended consequences, and it can reduce or remove the
conditions that have a negative impact on professional teaching and learning.

A crucial structural arrangement is that of heavy and persistent investment in professional

development. Too often educators and parents have said that classroom time cannot be
"sacrificed" for professional development. Too often dollars for professional development
have been slashed from educational budgets to "balance the books." Too often educators
have refused to participate in professional development opportunities because they didn't
want to "waste the time." To our way of thinking, such sentiments and practices are clearly
misguided. Time spent in professional learning is not wasted, and professional learning is
not a disposable frill. The time spent on professional learning can (and ought to) enhance
the time spent in the classroom. It is not a sacrifice of instructional time for the students
but is an investment in more effective classroom time. Of course, some "PD days" are a
complete waste of time because they have little, if any, relevance or meaning for the
teachers. Instead, professional development needs to be directly and explicitly linked to
classroom practices and school life, even when the topic is theoretical or philosophical in
nature.

Structural arrangements also have to provide opportunities for educators to engage in

professional conversations and to build a culture of inquiry. This is not to say that
mechanisms can be unilaterally imposed or that they can be rigid, static structures. Well-
intentioned collaborative ventures have often failed because there was insufficient
preparation, flexibility, or connectivity. When collaboration is mandated, when teachers are
forced to attend formal meetings, and when meeting topics are disconnected from
classroom life, the collaborative efforts are not authentic, and teachers are likely to resist.
What this implies is that, in the case of structures for professional exchange, form must
follow function rather than the other way around (Sergiovanni, 2000, p. 6). While there
needs to be time built into the school day for teachers to meet and to talk, the actual
arrangements for structuring the meetings will shift and change depending on the
circumstances of the day and the frames of reference of the teachers. Enabling structures
include (but are not limited to) collective reflection meetings, problem-solving think tanks,
formal opportunities for collaboration, connections to educational research and
development, and networking.

One way to keep the collaborative focus on teaching and learning is to institute a database
approach to professional discourse (Hannay & Ross, 1997). In this approach, teams collect
extensive and intensive data on a multitude of indicators, not the least of which are student
retention, student achievement, student interest, and student perception measures. Such
data are often collected in formal student assessment measures, in student satisfaction
surveys, or in class clinics where educators talk about some of the issues that come up on a
day-to-day basis or with individual students. But these are only the more typical sources
and measures. Data also can be collected from colleagues, parents, community members,
other educators, or anyone else who might have a stake in a particular educational
experience; data can be collected in relation to educational, social, financial, and political
conditions. The data provide a solid foundation for critical reflection and deep analysis of the
relationship between practice and the effects of practice. Without sufficient data, there is a
danger of relying on past practices and assumptions that are separated from actual
outcomes and that are unsupported by factual evidence.

Probably the most important structural arrangement has to do with power relationships in
the educational hierarchy. Typically, administrators have operated from control functions
and teachers from service functions. In that arrangement, administrators have made
decisions and teachers have implemented them. Furthermore, administrators have been
responsible for evaluating teachers' classroom performance and have often written
performance appraisals on the basis of very limited information. These conditions have
served to disconnect teachers from many of the decisions that have profound implications
for classroom practice and to disconnect administrators from the daily world of classroom
practice. This is more likely to lead to defensiveness and self-protection than to
experimentation with practice or to administrative support for new and unusual pedagogic
ideas. Instead, a learning community is better served by horizontal stratification than by
vertical. In other words, hierarchical levels are reduced and power is dispersed throughout
the school. In that kind of arrangement, administrators serve facilitative functions rather
than control functions, and performance appraisal ensues from a developmental perspective
rather than an evaluative one. This keeps administrators in touch with daily classroom
circumstances and practices, and it keeps teachers in touch with the decisions that affect
the ways in which they work with their students. Leadership is also dispersed throughout
the school, with different individuals taking on leadership roles in different situations. This
kind of ubiquitous power and leadership serves to facilitate work rather than control people.

This approach to power and leadership implies the development of a community of leaders.
By this, we mean a condition whereby individuals feel a deep sense of empowerment and
autonomy and a deep personal commitment to the work of the school. This does not mean
that leadership is necessarily shared by all or that there is no place for the school principal.
Instead, it means that leadership is enacted throughout the school by a variety of
individuals and in a variety of ways. Leadership occurs when individuals (any individuals,
including teachers, students, parents, school administrators, system administrators, and
others) identify gaps between existing conditions and desired realities and seek effective
and desirable ways to close at least some of those gaps. They muster whatever resources
they have available to them and they bring into play those people who are affected by the
gaps. The community of leaders notion implies that leadership capacity for a learning
community is a curious and complex dance between those who hold formal leadership
positions and those who take up leadership tasks on an informal or ad hoc basis. It locates
leadership and power within an environmental set of systemic, cultural, and political
elements, and it positions leadership as a strategy and power as a tool to advance the tasks
of influence, direction, and change for educational improvement.

In summary, organizational capacity entails creating a flexible system that is open to all
sorts of new ideas, that welcomes the eccentric and unusual as well as the tried and true. It
is as much about honouring diversity and embracing novelty as it is about opening doors
and breaking down walls. That means, as Hargreaves (1993) warns, that individualism and
solitude also need to be embraced, even in the midst of community and collaboration.
Organizational capacity is about building a system that invests heavily in professional
learning and relationship building (Haskins, Liedtka, & Rosenblum, 1998). At the school
level, it means placing "professional development at the core of teacher work to ingrain the
value of continuous professional learning throughout teachers' careers" (Scribner, 1999, p.
261). A learning community is supported when organizational structures, power dynamics,
and procedural frameworks support professional learning for individuals and for groups.

Relationships among the Capacities

We propose a recursive model in which the three categories of capacity mutually influence
one another, and growth in each category is built upon prior growth in itself and other
categories, which then builds a foundation for subsequent growth. Boundaries between
capacities are permeable, and borders are expandable. At times, circumstances will position
one kind of capacity ahead of the others, and attention will focus on that category for a
while. At other times, the three capacities will nest within one another, and it will be difficult
to tell them apart. Growth (and limits) will occur simultaneously in all three. Capacity builds
not in a smooth, linear flow but in eddies and swells as well as in dips and depressions when
no learning appears to be going on. The dips and depressions are opportunities to
understand what individuals are trying to conserve, as this can give insights into why they
do or do not embrace particular initiatives. According to Senge et al. (1999), ëWhether or
not we value a particular balancing process depends on how much we value what it
conserves' (p. 558, emphasis in the original). That is, growing seasons can yield the
capacity to illuminate the mysteries of life and learning; non-growing seasons can yield the
capacity to consolidate prior learning and to deal gracefully and effectively with difficult
circumstances and conserving tendencies.

The interpenetrations among the three pivotal capacities signify that "creating and
sustaining educational communities requires attending to many different aspects of life and
work in schools" (Beck, 1999, p. 37). That is, one cannot build capacity in one area and
expect that to suffice. Rather, there needs to be direct, sustained, focused attention on
building capacity in all three areas to allow for synergy to develop as each capacity builds
from and extends the others. That is, increased capacity in one category can exert pressure
for improvements in the other categories of capacity. Furthermore, Beck argues that "there
may be multiple points of entry into [community]" (p. 37). From our standpoint, this
suggests that the capacity of first attention is probably context specific. That is, whether
one starts to build personal, interpersonal, or organizational capacity will depend on the
needs of the people in each site, and an in-depth analysis of the context will probably
provide some clues as to where the most leverage will obtain. One word of caution: starting
with the least threatening capacity is probably the most enticing entry point but is not
necessarily the one that will lead to the greatest improvement. At some point, school people
need to tackle all three, even the ones that feel uncomfortable or risky. Any one of the
three levels of capacity cannot work alone to bring about the kind of changes we envision.
Without extended personal capacity, educators may not be able to deconstruct the implicit
elements of their professional narrative or have access to new ideas with which to
reconstruct it. Without extended interpersonal capacity, the socio-cultural elements in a
school may override any attempt to change the status quo. Without extended organizational
capacity, teachers are likely to have little incentive or support to undertake the deep
reflection, analysis, and reconstruction that can lead to profound improvement.

Positioning the Model

There is overwhelming agreement that professional learning, although not a magic bullet, is
directly and persistently linked to educational improvement and school development
(Bredeson & Scribner, 2000; Louis, Toole, & Hargreaves, 1999). If that is the case, then
there needs to be direct and persistent attention paid to the ways in which educators build
the capacity to engage in professional learning. Saying that it must be so will not
necessarily make it so, and sending teachers "out for training" will not necessarily garner
professional learning or generate change in educational practices. Instead, capacity needs
to be built in relation to personal knowledge and capabilities, interpersonal relations and
dynamics, and organizational structures and facilities. But when we talk about building
personal, interpersonal, and organizational capacities, we are not talking about simply
sharpening the edges of what we already do. We are talking about doing completely
different things ? and doing the same things completely differently. We envision a
transformation of practice rather than a tinkering with practice. It is, at its best, profound
improvement. It is a strategy for overcoming the tendency for educators ëto understand
new things in the same old ways' (Sergiovanni, 2000, p. 146).

The model we propose highlights the staff role of the teacher. Over the years our work with
learning communities in schools has led us to develop a different mind set about teachers,
one that places them in direct relationship with their colleagues. Traditionally, teachers have
been seen, studied, and discussed in terms of their classroom role--what they need in order
to teach children well. The model we present positions teachers in terms of their staff role--
what they need in order to live, learn, and work well together (as well as alone). Previous
models have looked at teachers as individuals rather than as members of a group, in which
the individuals affect the learning and work of each other. Our model sees the teacher's
work as a set of complex dynamics and interactions and the interplay of personal, collective,
and organizational narratives. Highlighting the staff role of the teacher requires a different
ideology based on different belief systems about what teachers can and should do in the
school.

Saying that a learning community must be thus and so does not automatically make it so.
The creation of a learning community is not an easy endeavour because it entails
fundamentally different ways of thinking about teaching and learning and fundamentally
different ways of being teachers and administrators. It asks educators to put their
professional identities on the line, to admit they do not know everything, to expose their
knowledge gaps to themselves and to their colleagues, and to reconstruct both their
professional narratives and their professional identities. This is truly an awesome and
frightening proposition. But the task is not an impossible one. It is, rather, a developmental
process that takes time, care, sustained attention, and commitment to make it so.

Because a learning community is a human system, it moves through cycles of progress and
regress. At times people will move forward eagerly, but at other times they will push
against the flow of the process. As Senge et al. (1999) point out, whenever something
changes in a human system, the system will push back to seek equilibrium and to conserve
certain aspects of the former condition. It is especially critical to remember this cyclic aspect
during periods of regress. At such times, the benefits that have accrued from previous
forward motions may be the only things that will sustain individuals' commitment to the
process. Although the underlying raison d'être of a learning community is to enhance
students' educational experience, considerable benefits are also in store for the professional
staff, and it is just these benefits that can sustain commitment to a decidedly difficult
journey.

The notion of the school as a learning community represents a fundamental shift in the
ideology that shapes the understanding of schools and of professional practice, one that is
grounded in a wholeness worldview and that is associated with a constructivist epistemology
and an interpretivist methodology. This worldview positions schools and learning as
generative rather than instrumental, inasmuch as learning is an organic aspect of the
human condition and schools are structured to facilitate human learning, regardless of the
direction that the learning takes. It foregrounds the notion that, through their interaction
patterns and organizational structures, people construct dominant organizational narratives
that henceforth shape thinking and learning and limit professional practice and discourse.
Intepretivist methodologies work to expose and to critique those narratives so that, if
necessary, they can be modified to honour the generative nature of learning. These notions
lie at the heart of everything that we have talked about in this paper. Even though we have
presented our ideas in chunks and pieces, these chunks are not separated from one another
in our own minds. Instead, they are all mutually influencing and deeply embedded
constructs that, together, constitute the ecosystem of a learning community.

In this paper, we have presented a brief summary of the concepts and issues that we
explore in greater depth in a full-length book (Mitchell & Sackney, 2000). In both this paper
and the longer text, we do not wish to situate the learning community as yet another recipe
with some strategies for tinkering at the margins of what we already do. It is, instead, a
way of being and a way of living. Nor are we presenting these ideas to convince the reader
that we have the answers or that we want to change everything in all schools. Rather, we
present these ideas to encourage readers to reflect on their own contexts. Although they
represent the ideas that have made sense for our professional and personal questions, they
are not necessarily the answer for other questions that should be posed in other contexts.
We share these frameworks and insights in the hope that they might spur some musing and
pondering about the tough problems and deep mysteries of teaching and learning, of
professional practice, and of profound improvement in educational adventures.

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