This document discusses the importance of developing a positive professional learning community (PLC) culture through dialogue. It outlines that a toxic culture must change through examining underlying mental models and having skillful discussions. Dialogue is highlighted as a process that balances advocacy and inquiry, encourages listening to develop shared understanding, and challenges assumptions. The document advocates for dialogue through truthful conversations where all voices are heard to cultivate change.

1. Dialogue and Discussion:
Tools for Creating and
Sustaining a PLC
Professional Learning Community What Really Is It?
NCSD Pre-Conference Session
December 1-2,2007
Kristine Kiefer Hipp, PH.D.

2. If you want to change and improve
the climate and outcomes of
schooling—both for students and
teachers, there are features of the
school culture that have to be
changed, and if they are not changed,
your well intentioned efforts will be
defeated.
 Seymore Sarason

3. The Culture Continuum
X---------------------X---------------------X
Toxic Culture Communal Culture Instructional Culture

4. Senge’s Five Disciplines for Organizational
Learning
 Personal Mastery
 Shared Vision
 Mental Models
 Team Learning
 Systems Thinking
 Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 1990

5. Mental Models
 Deeply ingrained assumptions…maps, pictures,
images that influence how we understand the world
and how we act.
 We are seldom “consciously” aware of our mental
models or the effects they have on our behaviors,
attitudes and practices.
 Reveal the reasoning and attitudes that underlie
individual and collective practices that can either
hinder or produce effective learning organizations.
 Examining our mental models offers educators the
highest leverage for transforming the educational
system.

6. An organization’s culture
can be seen as its
members’ collective mental
models, which is why you
cannot change an
organization without
investigating its cultural
assumptions.
Edgar Shein, Organizational
Culture and Leadership, 1992

7. Healthy conversations move team learning
on a continuum from :
X--------------X---------------X-------------X
Raw Debate Polite Discussion Skillful Discussion Dialogue

8. Skillful Discussion
 A process in which people come to some
type of closure on an issue:
 Making a decision
 Reaching an agreement
 Identifying priorities
 Develops deeper meaning among members,
but the primary focus is on task and
convergent thinking.

9. Dialogue
 Dialogue is a process in which people
engage in conversations where they openly
share their views and develop knowledge
about each other’s assumptions.
 Peter Senge, 1990, The Fifth Discipline

10. Dialogue
 Balances advocacy with inquiry
 Invites learning at a deeper level
 Encourages us to listen on multiple levels –
self, one another, and collectively…to honor
differences
 Challenges us to suspend our judgment
 Is different then discussion or debate
 Promotes creativity and shared meaning

11. In Dialogue…
 We rid ourselves of thinking…
 Our beliefs are the truth
 The truth is obvious
 Our beliefs are based on real data
 The data we select are real data
 Chris Argyris, 1990, Overcoming Organizational Defenses

12. “I believe we can change the world if we start
listening to one another again…Simple,
truthful conversation where we each have a
chance to speak, we each feel heard, and we
each listen well…Human conversation is the
most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the
conditions for change.”
• Margaret Wheatly, 2002, p.3, Turning To
One Another: Simple Conversations
Restore Hope to the Future