Analysis of Teacher Professional Communities of Practice PDF

An analysis of the role of teacher professional communities of practice  DBE Vision  The knowledge and skills that children need to succeed in the 21st century society are changing all the time.  Various education reforms have changed what and how teachers need...

An analysis of the role of teacher professional communities of practice  DBE Vision  The knowledge and skills that children need to succeed in the 21st century society are changing all the time.  Various education reforms have changed what and how teachers need to teach.  In order to keep abreast of these changes, teachers need to engage in lifelong professional development.  Why do we need professional learning communities as teachers ?  Effective professional development is development that has a sustainable, positive impact on the quality of teaching and learning.  professional development activities are more effective when they:  build on previous knowledge and experiences;  involve educators in active learning;  are relevant and context related;  stimulate interaction and collaboration;  are teacher-driven and promote ownership in learning;  promote critical and systematic reflection. contd  PLCs shows that when they are well practised, they contribute to improved teacher and learner learning and morale.  The practice of teachers working together is not new in the South African education system.  However, despite some examples of excellence, in many schools they do not exist at all; in others, they exist but not in a form that supports teacher learning.  The establishment of PLCs has been put forward in the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa, 2011-2025 (ISPFTED) as an instrument to strengthen teacher professionalism.  Let’s get a better idea at what a PLC is by looking at its name. It consists of three words: Professional, learning and  community  - Professional  A PLC is the work of professionals. This means that members of a PLC adopt a professional attitude. This implies a  focus on the interests of the learners and on supporting them in their learning. It also means that work in the PLC is  driven by knowledge and research. This can be that teachers discuss how to translate educational innovations into their  practice. It can also mean that teachers contribute to the research base by investigating and reflecting on their own  practice. contd  Learning  PLCs are all about learning: learning for learners as well as learning for teachers, learning for leaders, and learning  for schools. Professional learning includes learning based on knowledge from practice and knowledge from research.  This research can be done by teachers in their classrooms, for example by comparing the effect of various instructional strategies on learning.  - Community  PLCs are based on the vision that learning is more effective when it takes place within a community of professionals.  Schools can provide the structure and culture to facilitate such collective learning. Professional Learning Communities  The answer may be found in the collaboration achieved in professional learning communities (PLCs).  PLCs—which harness “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve”—are a common and proven practice to promote teacher collaboration that increases student achievement.  It's no secret that in today's complex world, students face unparalleled demands as they prepare for college, careers, and active citizenship.  However, those demands won't be met without a fundamental shift from traditional, teacher- centered instruction toward innovative, student-centered teaching and learning.  To make such a shift, project-based learning (PBL) offers a proven framework to help students be better equipped to tackle future challenges.  It encourages active questioning, curiosity, and peer learning;  create learning environments in which every student has a voice;  and have a mastery of content but are also comfortable responding to students' questions by saying, "I don't know. Let's find out together." Why should schools/institutions support PLCs?  PLCs help to increase the capacity of the school to achieve sustainable improvement in the learning that takes place in the school.  They fulfil a need for more professional development to become more authentic, timely and relevant.  Research shows that PLCs enhance teacher quality in various ways:  - They help bridging the gap between education theory, policy and practice, creating spaces for addressing practical issues and connecting pedagogical practice with subject content knowledge.  - They provide spaces where teachers share innovative ideas with experienced teachers and where experienced teachers mentor young teachers.  This stimulates teachers to interrogate and re-invigorate their practice rather than to recycle old ideas. professional learning communities (PLC) have two major goals: improved teacher practice (1) which leads  to improved learner achievement (2).  6. Key Characteristics of PLCs  Let’s explore in more depth what PLCs actually are according to researchers.  1. Mutual trust and respect(A PLC cannot be successful if members do not trust each other and respect each other’s differences.)  2. Support challenge and constructive critique (members challenge each other with ideas and questions. Constructive critique is invited and appreciated).  3. Shared vision and focus on learning for all learners (A shared vision on what constitutes high-quality teaching and learning is critical. When teachers take ownership of this commitment, learning (not teaching) becomes the focus).  4. Collaborative and reflective enquiry (Effective PLCs challenge this view and encourage opening up one’s classrooms through peer learning, team teaching, observations and Mentoring)  5. Inclusive membership(Diversity within a PLC helps creating a stimulating learning environment)  6. Leadership  7. Collective responsibility for student learning  6 Professional Learning Communities: A Model for South African Schools  8. Coherent, responsive change in practice  9. Regularity  10. Systematic, rigorous enquiry into practice  What is the purpose of the module?  The purpose of this module is to provide a conceptual framework to develop a community-based teacher preparation model.  In the following sections, programmatic examples used to create school- and community immersive teaching and learning are provided with the specific goal of developing an intentional pipeline of community-minded teachers committed to teach and stay in urban partner districts.  Teachers trained in this way positively impact students and families by contributing to the communities in which they become a part of.  Build the Culture  Design and Plan  Align to Standards  Manage Activities  Assess Student Learning  Scaffold Student Learning  Engage and Coach  Through guided immersive  programming early experiences starting in freshman year, community situated experiences are infused with frequent opportunities for TCs to engage in thoughtful discussions with peers and experienced professional educators, including accessing the collective knowledge of community scholars.  Such reflective discussions encourage TCs to examine how their own identities and those of their students shape understandings of and experiences in school.  These opportunities also become transformative, as a way to become not only acquainted with the cultural histories of their future students but also invested in and appreciative of both the problems and assets within communities.  How do you design for aliveness  The goal of community design is to bring out the community's own internal direction, character, and energy.  Communities of practice are voluntary, what makes them successful over time is their ability to generate enough excitement, relevance, and value to attract and engage members.  Although many factors, such as management support or an urgent problem, can inspire a community, nothing can substitute for this sense of aliveness.  Certainly you cannot contrive or dictate it.  You cannot design it in the traditional sense of specifying a structure or process and then implementing it. Still, aliveness does not always happen automatically.  Many natural communities never grow beyond a network of friends because they fail to attract enough participants.  Many intentional communities fall apart soon after their initial launch because they don't have enough energy to sustain themselves.  Communities, unlike teams and other structures, need to invite the interaction that makes them alive Organizational relationships  The structure of organizational relationships and events also invite a kind of interaction.  Meetings that contain some open time during a break or lunch, with enough space for people to mingle or confer privately, invite one-on-one discussion and relationship building.  Communities also need to contribute to organizational goals.  The goal of community design is to bring out the community's own internal direction, character, and energy.  The principles are designed to focus on the dilemmas at the heart of designing communities of practice.  What is the role of design for a "human institution" that is, by definition, natural, spontaneous, and self-directed?  How do you guide such an institution to realize itself, to become "alive?"  From our experience we have derived seven principles:  1.1. Life as a teacher educator  While there are exceptions, academic life as a teacher educator has been portrayed as lonely and personally demanding (Hadar & Brody, 2010); characterized by stress, pressure, and uncertainty (Austin, 2002).  Expectations of colleges and universities in which teacher educators work, serve, at times unwittingly, to add to the uncertainty by conveying conflicting messages.  In one instance, they represent, “a culture of competition among institutions, among programs and among faculty” where “cooperation is often not only difficult to achieve but rarely rewarded” (Diamond, 2006;para. 4).  Yet, in others, they are a place where conversations and connections are viewed as a necessity for program development and professional growth (Cole, 1999).  Professional development for teacher educators  To address the unique working conditions and expectations of teacher educators, professional development must be “purposefully conceptualized, thoughtfully implemented, and meaningfully employed” (Loughran, 2014, p. 10) to support growth and change(Hadar & Brody, 2010).  Smith (2003) identifies the myriad of professional competencies required of teacher educators to include,but not limited to “content, pedagogical, organizational, group dynamic and communicative and developmental and personal growth” (p.202).  In addition to their teaching roles, teacher educators are expected to conduct and disseminate research, add to the teacher education knowledge base, develop reciprocal collaborations with schools, and promote education in general (Oser, 1998;Smith, 2003).  1.3. Communities of practice  Many educational theorists have promoted learning as participation (e.g., Dewey, 1916; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Sch€on, 1983; Vygotsky, 1978).  In these situations learning is assumed to be social and situated; often occurring in informal contexts such as communities through interaction, communication, taking part, and gaining access to different contexts (Quennerstedt & Maivorsdotter, 2017).  In recent literature, communities of practice (CoP) represent a promising theme in the professional development of teacher educators (Brody & Hadar, 2011; Hadar & Brody, 2010; Swennen & Bates, 2010).  While different interpretations of CoP make it challenging to apply the concept in meaningful ways (Boylan, 2010); it nonetheless provides a powerful framework for examining teacher educator learning.  In one conceptualization, CoP are a social organizationin which learning and participation takes place (Boylan,2010). an analysis of the barriers (structural and internal) to building communities of practice amongst teachers.  Diversity in educational level: refers to the mix of educational background of team members.  This mix might enhance the breadth of perspectives, cognitive resources, and overall problem- solving capacity of the team since teachers from different educational backgrounds carry not only different knowledge but also different vocabularies, cognitive patterns and styles (Drach-Zahavy and Somech, 2002)..  Diversity in tenure: refers to diversity in years on the job.  Some found that diversity in tenure was positively related to successful outcomes due to the combination of experience of the long tenured with the openness and new ideas of novices.  Others found negative effects of tenure diversity. It can lead to dissimilarities in attitudes and experience which may cause varied outlooks that are difficult to reconcile (Drach-Zahavy and Somech, 2002). contd  Relations-oriented diversity attributes are:  Diversity in gender: the mix of males and females in the team.  The mix can hinder performance because of underlying conventions that stimulate the way team members feel, think, and interact (Drach-Zahavy and Somech, 2002).  Gender diversity can result in conflict (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007).  Diversity in age: diversity of ages within a team.  Studies indicate that interpersonal relations and interaction patterns that result from age stereotyping determine what information is available to the team, what information is addressed in the team and who has the most influence in decision making process (Turner, 1987).