Profound Improvement: Building Capacity for a Learning Community (Contexts of Learning)

This text positions the learning community as a vehicle for professional learning and school development. The learning community develops in response to building capacity in three domains: personal, interpersonal and organizational. In the personal domain, educators deconstruct and reconstruct their professional narratives to enhance student learning and professional practice.In the interpersonal domain, educators generate norms and values that foster experimentation and critical analysis of educational practice and that promote collective and individual learning. In the organizational domain, visible and invisible structures are constructed that enable community members to enact educational practices in support of profound improvement in teaching and learning.
The book focuses on the life of educators as it relates to professional learning and growth. It is concerned with human growth and development, human cognition and affect and human interactions and actions in the context of a school community. It places at the centre of the discourse some of the less controlable aspects of professional development - the undercurrents of professional presuppositions and beliefs as well as the surface waves of professional knowledge and learning. From this perspective, building a learning community is a dynamic process that engages the individual, the group and the organization in embedded interdependencies and mutual influences.

Coral Mitchell is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Canada.

Larry Sackney is Emeritus Professor of Educational Administration in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.