INTRODUCTION

      Systemic PLCs

      Rick DuFour has spent a professional lifetime showing what well-implemented professional learning communities look like, how to create them, and why they are good for students and teachers. Hundreds of schools have experienced significant gains in student achievement by embracing the PLC process (as documented on allthingsplc.info). In 2011, three of the four finalists for national superintendent of the year in the United States attributed their district’s success in raising student achievement to the PLC at Work™ process that Rick created with his colleagues Robert Eaker and Rebecca DuFour. He asserts that the best hope for sustained and substantive school improvement is to develop the capacity of educators to function as members of a PLC.

      Michael Fullan has devoted his distinguished professional career to the exploration of how to best bring about meaningful change in schools, districts, and the educational system as an entity. Combining a focus on the moral imperative with how to change whole systems, Michael has helped lead large-scale successful reform in several countries.

      In one of his latest works, Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School, Michael and his coauthorAndy Hargreaves (2012) acknowledge the value of well-implemented PLCs. But they also observe that, too often, PLC strategies “have been imposed simplistically and heavy-handedly by overzealous administrators” (p. 128), that PLCs are sometimes viewed more favorably by those at the top (administrators) than they are by those on the ground (teachers), and that “the current PLC movement should be reconfigured and reconsidered” (p. 136).

      With this book, Cultures Built to Last: Systemic PLCs at Work™, the two of us have teamed up in an effort to stress our continuing support for the PLC process, but we also recast PLCs from just another attractive innovation for individual schools to the central instrument for changing the culture of the education system: district-, state-, and nationwide. An orientation and commitment to whole-system reform are especially important for PLCs because they started as—and it is easy for them to be stuck at—being an individual-school phenomenon. To make PLCs systemic, leaders at all levels must see the strategy as tantamount to changing the culture of the system. They must abandon the perception that PLCs represent a program to be implemented and recognize that the PLC process is a cultural transformation that has lasting value.

The Challenge of Cultural Change

      Structural change deals with policies, programs, rules, and procedures. A characteristic of structural change, one that political and educational leaders often find attractive, is that these changes can be mandated. A state government can increase graduation requirements, adopt the Common Core State Standards, or increase the number of required school days in a calendar year. A district can move its high schools to a block schedule, adopt a new language arts program, or require students to wear school uniforms as a matter of fiat.

      Unlike structural change that can be mandated, cultural change requires altering long-held assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and habits that represent the norm for people in the organization. These deeply held but typically unexamined assumptions help people make sense of their world. More simply put, culture is just “the way we do things around here.” Systemic implementation of the PLC process requires changing the way things have typically been done at all levels.

      Two things are true about cultural change: it is absolutely doable, but it is also undeniably difficult. Factors that contribute to the difficulty include the following:

      • It requires significant changes to traditional schooling practices that have endured for over a century. In particular, it changes the way that