Disseminators of Information about the Project to Other Audiences

Acknowledging the significance of PLCs in their own professional areas of interest and affiliation, SEDL helped to identify Co-Developers who held membership in similar organizations. SEDL then organized Co-Developers into groups to plan dissemination of information about the CCCII project.

Meeting time allocated for this purpose had positive results. For example, one Co-Developer asked SEDL staff to write an article for her state's professional development publication. Another Co-Developer, the editor of a national school development council publication, included articles from SEDL staff and colleague Co-Developers for an entire issue focused on PLCs. Other Co-Developers collaboratively developed and delivered presentations about professional learning communities and the CCCII project at a national staff development conference.

The most obvious example of Co-Developers serving as information disseminators comes from the activities of the self-formed "research group" of Co-Developers. Comprised primarily of university faculty who have a professional interest in being published, members of this group serve as mentors, editors, collaborators and friends to one another, in support of efforts to collect, code, analyze, write about, and publish articles about this project in professional journals and through professional conferences. At the Year 2000 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Co-Developers from the SEDL project presented six papers reporting learnings from the project. The intensity of effort required to write and deliver these papers further strengthened the commitment of the researchers to the project and understanding of how PLCs can support school improvement.

There is no way to measure the informal dissemination of the fruits of the project that occurs between school personnel and is accomplished through conversation and example. There is little doubt that conversations of principals and lead teachers in the CCCII project schools have impacted practice and interactions in ways that cannot be ascertained in this study. Similarly, conversations among principals or among district personnel involved in the project with their co-workers represent effective, valuable, and actual methods whereby this project is being explained and explored in educational circles across the nation.

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