The School as a Learning Community

A new situation arrives at school. It may be a technology that changes the way people research and write; an inclusion demand for which the usual answers are no longer enough; a conflict that exposes shifts in the relationships between students; a family raising an unprecedented question; or a regulatory change that requires procedures to be revised.

The school has to respond. Teachers talk in the corridors. Coordinators look for references. Support staff share observations that have not yet reached formal meetings. School leaders weigh the educational, administrative and financial implications. Between attempts, doubts and decisions, the school learns.

If schools exist to promote learning, why do we still treat the learning of their own professionals as something that should happen outside school time, school space and the school budget?

Every routine teaches something. Every meeting establishes ways of interpreting problems. Every decision reveals what the institution values. Even the absence of spaces for reflection produces learning: in that case, people learn that difficulties are to be solved individually, that asking questions may signal a lack of preparation, and that studying is an activity to be carried out after hours.

Teacher development rightly occupies a central place in this discussion. It is in the classroom that many social, technological and cultural transformations appear most immediately. A school, however, is not made up of teachers' work alone. Principals, coordinators, counsellors, inclusion specialists, administrative teams, supervisors, mediators, technology staff and other workers also take part in the school experience. Their decisions affect learning, coexistence, care and the institution's relationship with students and families.

This does not mean everyone should receive the same training. It means recognising that complex problems cut across different roles and therefore call for moments of shared learning alongside role-specific pathways.

When a school discusses artificial intelligence, for example, it is not facing a purely technological question. There are curricular, ethical, copyright, assessment, administrative and data protection implications. When it discusses inclusion, the conversation should not be limited to the teacher or the support professional. The way the institution welcomes, records, communicates, organises spaces and makes decisions is also part of its educational response.

A learning community does not dilute the specific responsibilities of each role. On the contrary: it allows those responsibilities to be exercised with greater awareness of how they relate to one another.

The most recent data helps to reveal an important contradiction. According to TALIS 2024, the international survey coordinated by the OECD, 90% of Brazilian lower secondary teachers say that the professional learning activities they took part in over the previous 12 months had a positive impact on their practice. The point, therefore, is not to convince professionals that continuous learning matters. They already recognise its value.

The problem appears when we look at the obstacles. Among those same teachers, 57% point to a lack of employer support as a barrier to taking part in professional learning activities. For 52%, these activities conflict with their work schedule; the same share considers their cost too high.

The data paints an uncomfortable picture: professional learning is seen as relevant, but carrying it out runs into precisely the institutional conditions of time and funding.

The working week itself helps to put the issue in perspective. Full-time teachers in Brazil report an average of 40.3 working hours per week. Of that total, 29.2 hours are devoted to teaching, 9.3 hours to lesson planning and 6.1 hours to marking (categories that may overlap in respondents' accounts, but that reveal an already heavily occupied routine).

In this context, recommending that professionals “keep themselves up to date” without reorganising their work means adding a new obligation to a schedule that can no longer accommodate the previous ones. The discourse of professional learning then risks turning into individual accountability: the institution demands updating, but the worker must find the course, the money and the time on their own.

A caveat is needed: recognising the need for investment does not mean defending the multiplication of lectures, platforms or certificates. Not every activity labelled as training produces relevant learning.

For a long time, part of continuing education was organised around a deficit logic. First, what the professional supposedly lacks is identified; then, content is offered to fill that gap. From this perspective, someone who supposedly knows transmits answers to someone defined by what they do not yet know.

School experience, however, resists that linear model. Professionals do not arrive empty-handed at training sessions. They bring knowledge, doubts, memories, values, strategies and interpretations produced in concrete contexts. Nor do they leave with definitive answers to situations that have not yet happened.

In my article A formação docente em serviço a partir do lugar caótico do não-saber, I propose thinking of professional learning as a less predictable process, more attentive to the emergence of knowledge built through different forms of representation, experience and perspective. “Not-knowing”, in this case, is not the same as being unprepared. It is the willingness to recognise that the complexity of practice does not fit entirely into answers formulated in advance.

There is an important difference between not knowing because one has not had access to a given body of knowledge and recognising that we do not yet know, collectively, how to respond to a new situation. In the first case, offering a repertoire may be necessary. In the second, conditions must be created to investigate, experiment, dialogue and produce knowledge.

Consistent professional learning must be able to do both. If in-service learning contributes to the school's learning culture, it needs to appear in institutional planning. And planning needs to reach the budget.

This includes resources for courses and external specialists when necessary, but it does not end there. Investing in professional learning may mean paying for study time, organising cover for absent staff, preparing professionals to act as mentors, encouraging peer observation, sustaining research groups, documenting experiences and ensuring continuity for the processes that have been started.

One way to support this path is to draw on environments that bring learning and practice closer together. The Educando Juntos portal, for example, offers micro-credentials related to the practices of the adults who work in schools. The initiative can foster a learning community by recognising smaller learning pathways, connected to concrete everyday situations and shared by professionals with different responsibilities. For the school, the benefit is not limited to individual certification: the repertoires developed can circulate between teams, support conversations about practice and make visible a form of learning that often happens in scattered ways. When articulated with institutional planning, micro-credentials of this kind help bring learning and work closer together, respecting different paces without losing sight of the collective construction of knowledge.

The main resource is perhaps the most contested one: protected time. Without it, professional learning tends to occupy breaks, weekends or moments originally intended for other tasks. As a result, even relevant proposals can be perceived as overload. Not because professionals reject learning, but because learning also requires availability, elaboration and a return to practice.

Naturally, school leaders work with limited budgets and competing decisions. Recognising professional learning as a priority does not remove those constraints. It does, however, allow for a more honest discussion. If the institution expects its professionals to respond to new demands, adopt technologies, transform practices, serve more diverse communities and make increasingly complex decisions, it needs to consider the conditions that make those changes possible.

Every budget expresses a conception of school. By setting aside resources for the learning of its professionals, leadership states that knowledge does not reach the institution only through hiring, purchasing or imposition. It is also produced by those who live the school's everyday life.

A school does not become a learning community because it has added a few training dates to its calendar. The change happens when learning becomes part of the way the institution works.

This becomes visible when a doubt can be raised without being immediately read as incompetence; when unsuccessful experiences can be analysed without automatically turning into blame; when different professionals take part in understanding the problems; when the knowledge produced does not disappear at the end of a meeting; and when leadership follows up on what changed (or did not) after a training experience.

A learning culture also requires selection. Not every novelty deserves adoption, not every technology represents progress, and not every external demand should reorganise the school. Learning is not about permanently chasing the new. It is about expanding the collective capacity to interpret change and to decide, with criteria, what to do in the face of it.

This is perhaps the most important sense of understanding the school as a learning community. It is not about erasing the difference between those who teach and those who learn, nor about creating an obligation for everyone to learn everything all the time. It is about recognising that no institution dedicated to educating people can consider finished the education of those who build it every day.

The school will always produce answers, habits and knowledge. What leaders have to decide is whether that learning will keep depending on improvisation and on the invisible effort of each professional, or whether it will find a legitimate place in the institution's time, planning and budget.