Effective professional learning communities? The possibilities for teachers as agents of change in schools

By Cate Watson. 2014

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The concept of the professional learning community (PLC) has been embraced widely in schools as a means for teachers to engage in professional development leading to enhanced pupil learning. However, the term has become so ubiquitous it is in danger of losing all meaning, or worse, of reifying ‘teacher learning’ within a narrowly defined ambit which loses sight of the essentially contestable concepts which underpin it. The primary aim of this paper is therefore to (re-)examine the assumptions underpinning the PLC as a vehicle for teacher led change in schools in order to confront and unsettle a complacent and potentially damaging empirical consensus around teacher learning. This paper examines the characteristics and attributes of the ‘effective’ professional learning community as identified in the literature, drawing out the tensions and contradictions embodied in the terms professional, learning and community. The paper considers the implications of this analysis for practice, and concludes by offering some insights into the nature of ‘school improvement’, and the role of PLCs in realizing this.

Subfields: Education, Human Factors and Ergonomics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5bafe892b645dfb52cbf371b18a060485b1556d1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Selçuk Doğan
2. Alyson Adams
3. Mikael Quennerstedt
4. K. Armour
5. K. Makopoulou

In Human Factors and Ergonomics

1. Alyson Adams
2. Selçuk Doğan

Citations in the corpus

• What is ‘effective’ CPD for contemporary physical education teachers? A Deweyan framework (2017, background): “Yet Watson (2014) urges some caution, arguing that the term ‘PLC’ has been used as a kind of catch-all phrase that has lost much of its original meaning.”
• Effect of professional learning communities on teachers and students: reporting updated results and raising questions about research design (2018, background): “assumptions underlying PLCs (Watson, 2014) and the factors, processes, and reform theories that should make PLCs more effective (Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, & Thomas, 2006).”