Professional learning communities. Diagnostic tools and assessment

Abstract

The Professional Learning Communities are a new formula to re-design the schools, where collective work and collaboration between teachers are the key to improve upon their educational practice. We need to change our culture for that it is necessary a lot of work and effort. This new way of working together involve the redesign, critical and constructive reflection of the educational practice, in this respect along this article we analyze and describe the instruments designed up until now, that we know, that us will be of great help to evaluate the degree of implementation of a Professional Learning Communities.
Among the instruments are devised by Hord (1996) created from the five critical attributes of a Professional Learning Community that allows to determine the maturity of the staff as a community of learning, according to levels of development. On the other hand, we analyze the instrument devised by Olivier, Hipp and Huffman (2003) designed from the dimensions of Shirley Hord (1997) to assess perceptions of the educational community and which has been useful to educators and researchers to determine the degree of development and strength of the practices within each dimension.

Keywords

Professional Learning Communities, diagnostic tools, assessment, educational change.