Schoolwide Action Research for Professional Learning Communities: Improving Student Learning Through the Whole-Faculty Study Groups Approach

Foster schoolwide professional learning through a collaborative action research model!

In this how-to guide, readers will discover how Whole-Faculty Study Groups (WFSGs) use action research to involve an entire professional learning community in advancing staff learning and school performance. The authors discuss steps for implementing schoolwide action research and show readers how:

• The WFSG system compares with other approaches to action research
• The schoolwide action research process can be applied in a wide variety of school reform efforts
• Study groups move from discussion to action that improves teacher practice
• Principals and district leaders can support schoolwide action research

Discover how Whole-Faculty Study Groups (WFSGs) use collaborative action research to involve an entire professional learning community in improving staff and school performance.

Karl H. Clauset is director of the National Whole-Faculty Study Groups Center. He is an experienced school improvement coach and Whole-Faculty Study Group (WFSG) trainer. Since 1999, he has helped more than fifty elementary, middle, and high schools launch WFSG and has supported the schools through the implementation phase. He is also a senior consultant with Focus on Results and works with district offices in school systems to help them align and support reform efforts in schools. Previously, he worked as a site developer with ATLAS Learning Communities, a nationally recognized school reform program, and in standards-based reform and international education development at the Education Development Center.

In his earlier careers in education, he worked as a teacher and administrator at the Jakarta International School in Indonesia and taught in secondary schools in Philadelphia, Zambia, and Tanzania. He received a national award from ASCD for the outstanding dissertation in supervision in 1983 for his doctoral dissertation on the dynamics of effective schooling. As a faculty member at the Boston University School of Education, he taught graduate courses in educational policy analysis, organizational analysis, and planning. Before moving to western Washington in 2003, he served as an elected school board member and board chair for six years in his Massachusetts community.