Weathering the Storm: Unexpected Benefits of a Professional Learning Community

Abstract

Over the course of four years, our small team of informal marine science educators at the University of Texas-Austin Marine Science Institute and the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve established a professional learning community (PLC) to strengthen and advance our own professional practice and improve the education programs we designed and facilitated. During this period of growth and community-building, we experienced the devastation of a category 4 hurricane and the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the turmoil of these events, our team was able to rely upon the PLC’s established routines to maintain a sense of normalcy, as well as a trusted, safe, and supportive environment to work through the impacts to our professional practice. The upfront investment of time and staff energy yielded unexpected value and power by getting our team through two highly disruptive events and created a team that showed up, stayed committed, collaborated, and continued to work toward our shared goals. While all of our informal marine science education colleagues around the nation shared the impacts of the pandemic, our team had already weathered the devastation of a hurricane and reaped the benefits of our PLC, setting us up to be even more responsive and resilient to the pandemic. This article seeks to reflect on what contributed to our resilience, how we might use that information to (re)build our programs going forward, and how others can use our story to examine their own investment in their teams and programs through a PLC lens.

Keywords

• informal education
• communities of practice
• marine science education