‘Working Smarter By Working Together’

The professional learning community has become a way of life at Adlai E. Stevenson, where teachers have been perfecting the concept for a quarter-century.

Lincolnshire, Ill.

Teacher collaboration is hailed as one of the most effective ways to improve student learning, and one high school in Illinois is often credited with perfecting the concept.

Adlai E. Stevenson High School was one of the first in the nation to embrace what are known as professional learning communities. The school’s focus on teacher teamwork has catapulted it from an ordinary good school to an extraordinary one, advocates say: Among its many accolades, it has been a U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon school for four years—one of only three nationwide to achieve that honor. Moreover, as many as 96 percent of Stevenson’s students go on to college. So well known are the learning communities here that each year, 3,000 people visit the school’s sprawling campus 30 miles northwest of Chicago to experience firsthand how its teacher-collaboration model works.

Eric Twadell, the superintendent of Stevenson High, a one-school district, describes the professional learning community, or PLC, as “teachers working smarter by working together.” From the beginning, he said, the idea was not to create something new or different, but simply to foster an atmosphere in which teachers could learn from one another and share their colleagues’ expertise so that, in the...