Connected Learning Communities Model

See more Change Theories »Summary written by John R. Morelock, University of Georgia,john.morelock@uga.edu

Summary

While many models of change focus on effective approaches to achieve clearly defined outcomes, the Connected Learning Communities Model (Stoll, 2009) focuses instead on creating educational organizations that can readily evolve in response to the changing needs of their stakeholders. The model describes necessary behaviors and conditions to support continuous learning across the organization. It focuses on facilitating learning across disciplinary and power boundaries (e.g., academic and administrative hierarchies).  Accordingly, this model is appropriate for change leaders who seek to support overall organizational health and adaptability, rather than leaders seeking to implement a specific change.

Connected Learning Communities (CLCs) are communities that form beyond typical bounds of organizational hierarchy or common interest. CLCs intentionally include broad membership with divergent knowledge bases.  Addressing new organizational needs often necessitates collaboration across areas of expertise and levels of leadership; thus, organizations with thriving CLCs are well-poised to enact such change.  The hallmark of an effective CLC is regular dialogue across typical organizational "silos" (e.g., across departments or institutions)—called bridging social capital—and across levels of power (e.g., dialogue between deans, department heads, tenured, tenure-track, and instructional faculty)—called linking social capital.

As the preceding paragraph suggests, dialogue is the key mechanism through which CLCs are built and maintained.  The CLC Model defines dialogue as a "genuine thinking together" in which community members explore and compare their tacit knowledge, and in which they reveal, examine, and challenge ideas, beliefs, and assumptions in order to build collective intelligence within the organization.  In particular, CLCs strive to cultivate a particular form of dialogue called learning conversations, which focus on helping community members reflect on their practices as a member of the organization.  These conversations include introducing new knowledge, building in time to reflect on processes, and prominently feature constructive questioning and active listening from all members.

The CLC Model describes four specific activities that support learning conversations:

1. Supported practice: Community members support one another in trying new things and overcoming challenges.  This activity includes encouragement, but also constructive questioning from diverse perspectives that leads to deep reflection on practice.
2. Collaborative inquiry: Community members engage in a variety of inquiry activities that introduce new ideas to the community.  Examples include reading and discussing evidence-based literature, mutual classroom observation or review of student work, sharing teaching and learning processes and results, and collectively analyzing data collected via the scholarship of teaching and learning.
3. Knowledge animation: Community members share their knowledge with the group in a way that members of diverse backgrounds can engage with it and the community can synthesize different sources of knowledge into new ideas.  The term "animation" is used instead of "sharing" or "dissemination" because simply reporting on data or sharing resources is not sufficient for learning in CLCs, whose members do not all share a common disciplinary or demographic background. Community members must make their knowledge "come to life" for other members of the community that may not share their expertise and interests.
4. Meta-learning with peers: Community members and the community as a whole must take time to reflect on their own learning processes to determine what is working, what is not working, and why.

The CLC Model also acknowledges three conditions necessary for the cultivation of CLCs to be viable and sustainable:

1. Common, learning-friendly culture: CLCs thrive in organizations that value learning and personal growth as a necessary component of organizational health.  Such cultures (1) discourage people from considering learning something as "someone else's business"; and (2) encourage people to think of their own learning as something that will benefit others in the organization, not just themselves.  An important product of learning-friendly culture is the ability and willingness to adapt language to allow community members to communicate across disciplinary and power boundaries.
2. Trusting, respectful, and equal relationships: Each community member must feel like a valued participant of the community, and feel able to trust other community members.  Personal friendships between members are not necessary, but dysfunctional relationships between members that are not addressed will harm the community.  The term "equal relationships," in this context, means that members should share knowledge freely such that no one person remains "the expert" in a particular area or hoards undue decision-making power.  Collaborative activities form a powerful positive feedback loop for establishing trust--the more people collaborate, the more they trust each other; the more they trust each other, the more likely they are to collaborate.  The encouragement of competition between members is antithetical to this supporting condition.
3. Supportive structures: The organization must be structured to support learning.  Two key structural variables are time and space.
   1. Meaningful learning requires time for dialogue, reflection, and experimentation.  Participation in the CLC should be encouraged by organizational leadership as a valuable component of one's professional life, rather than an "add-on" to an already overloaded work schedule.
   2. Use of space is essential to ensure equal relationships.  Always holding meetings in one location that is more accessible to some members than others risks reducing the community's "bridging" or "linking" social capital by introducing systemic barriers for other members.  CLC meetings should take place in spaces that are easily accessible to everyone in the group (e.g., a virtual or hybrid meeting), in unshared territory (e.g., a local restaurant), or otherwise rotate between locations shared by their members.

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Figure 1. A visual overview of the mechanisms, activities, conditions, and people required to create connected learning communities in an organization. Adapted from Stoll (2009).

Provenance: John Morelock
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Finally, the CLC Model acknowledges that these activities and conditions do not naturally emerge in most organizations.  They require supportive leadership that considers organizational learning essential to long-term organizational health, and facilitators that ensure CLC activities lead to productive dialogue and learning conversations.  However, Stoll (2009) also emphasizes that leadership and facilitators must respect the expertise and autonomy of community members, and seek to support learning conversations, not control them.   Whenever possible, leadership of (and power within) the CLC should be distributed among its members.

Example of Use

While applications in higher education are limited, The Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) at the University of Georgia has used the CLC Model to design and cultivate its teaching and learning development programs for engineering faculty, staff, and graduate students (Morelock, 2021).  Morelock's description of the model's use focuses on how the four supporting activities were realized in the form of educational development programs:

1. Supported Practice: EETI runs biweekly faculty learning communities and weekly peer mentoring meetings where faculty, staff, graduate students, and administrators come to discuss current educational happenings and challenges, and the communities work together to address these challenges.
2. Collaborative Inquiry: EETI hosts monthly seminar-style forums where local and national experts explore education-related topics of interest to the College of Engineering community.  The forums include a social lunch to allow for dialogue surrounding the seminar.
3. Knowledge Animation: One forum each semester is an engineering education showcase, where two or three people present on something innovative they have been doing to support student success.  Forum attendees span all engineering disciplines as well as general education specialists, requiring showcase presenters to make their approaches and course contexts come alive for a broad audience.
4. Meta-Learning with Peers: EETI distributes a survey at least once per year to assess response to recent programs and gauge topics and activities of interest for upcoming programs.

Assumptions & Limitations

Many of the model's assumptions are baked into the three necessary conditions for connected learning communities to be feasible.  The model assumes CLCs can only be successful and sustainable in organizations that (1) value learning as a key component of employees' work; (2) encourage collaboration, respect, trust, and distribution of power across employees; and (3) provide the time and space necessary for learning conversations to take place.  If any of these conditions is not met, attempts to develop healthy CLCs will be unsustainable at best, or completely infeasible at worst.

One limitation of the model is that the research and legwork employed to create it was in the context of building social capital among pre-tertiary schools in the United Kingdom (Bolam et al., 2005).  Accordingly, it has seen very limited use in higher education change contexts.

Related Theories

Connected Learning Communities is an extension of Louise Stoll's prior work on Professional Learning Communities (Bolam et al., 2005), which focused on building bridging social capital (i.e., across disciplines and institutions.)  The CLC Model expands on this work by prioritizing linking social capital (i.e., relationships across power boundaries) as a primary outcome of learning communities.

Original Publication of Theory

Stoll, L. (2009). Connecting Learning Communities: Capacity Building for Systemic Change. In A. Hargreaves, A. Lieberman, M. Fullan, & D. Hopkins (Eds.), Second International Handbook of Educational Change (pp. 469-484). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Other References

Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Stoll, L., Thomas, S., Wallace, M., Greenwood, A., . . . Smith, M. (2005). Creating and Sustaining Effective Professional Learning Communities. Bristol, England: University of Bristol.

Morelock, J. R. (2021, June 10). Walking the walk of complex systems: Moving beyond "doing change" to build systemic capacity. Presented at the Transforming Institutions 2021 Virtual Conference. https://ascnhighered.org/ASCN/transforming_institutions/2021/program/presentations/session_v/242432.html