Thesis advisor: Irwin Blumer / This study was conducted within a small urban high school that exclusively serves English Language Learners in the northeastern United States. The purpose of the study was to determine teachers' perceptions of learning from each other, student learning and school wide collaboration as a result of the implementation of a Professional Learning Community as a means of improving instruction. The body of related literature provided the theoretical rationale for the data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Major sections of the literature review included: the definition and elements that make up a Professional Learning Community, a review of the theoretical and recent research concerning best practices to support English Language Learners and a review of the research regarding teacher collaboration. Data were gathered from six participants through pre and post interviews, journal entries throughout the year of the study, field notes from announced and announced visits and teacher made documents collected throughout the year of the study. Key findings included participants' perceptions that: they learned both practical and adaptive skills from their colleagues, that peer observation aided teachers in improving their practice, that student learning and student motivation increased, that participants felt that they made stronger relationships with students and that collaboration increased as a result of the implementation of the Professional Learning Community. Current research asserts that schools that implement purposeful and well planned Professional Learning Communities that provide time, space and training may foster teacher ownership that can be used as a powerful vehicle for improving teaching and learning and school wide collaboration. The study findings affirmed this. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Administration.

The American education system must utilize collaboration to meet the challenges and demands our culture poses for schools. Deeply rooted processes and structures favor teaching and learning in isolation and hinder the shift to a more collaborative paradigm. Professional learning communities (PLCs) support continuous teacher learning, improved efficacy, and program implementation. The PLC provides the framework for the development and enhancement of teacher collaboration and teacher collaboration develops and sustains the PLC. The interpersonal factors that influence collaboration make it difficult to implement and preclude the use of any systematic directions to develop a PLC successfully. However, research has identified emerging strategies that could guide the development of collaborative cultures for school improvement. The researcher designed this case study to describe collaboration in the PLC of an elementary school. The study focuses on collaborative behaviors, perceptions, influences, barriers, and strategies present in the school. The researcher utilized the Professional Learning Community Organizer (Hipp & Huffman, 2010) in the analysis of the data. Hipp, Huffman and others continued the research started by Hord (1990) and identified PLC dimensions and behaviors associated with those dimensions. The PLCO included behaviors aligned with the initiating, implementing, and sustaining phases of each dimension of a PLC. Structure and process, trust and accountability, and empowerment emerged as important themes in the observed PLC. The sequential path to teacher empowerment began with the development of structure and process. Teachers developed trust in each other by demonstrating accountability required by those structures and processes. Trust provided opportunities for risk taking and leadership to emerge. The teachers and administrators demonstrated their commitment to the vision and worked collaboratively for the learning success of all students. The data provided evidence of administrators and teachers making decisions to solve problems and improve instruction based on the vision. The PLC of the elementary school observed demonstrated development at the implementing and sustaining levels. The teachers and administrators worked collaboratively over time to improve teacher practice resulting in improved student learning. The opportunity to utilize the PLC for continuous growth by challenging the new norms and embracing risk taking remains. / Ed. D.

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In a local suburban K-8 school in California, administrators and teachers were concerned when more than half of the fifth- and seventh-grade students indicated on the California Healthy Kids Survey that they do not feel safe at school. Researchers have noted that using a professional learning community (PLC) model in schools may assist with addressing bullying. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore teachers' and administrators' responses to incidences of bullying and the PLC processes used to address such incidents in their school. The conceptual framework for this study was Hord's dimensions of the PLC. Data were collected through individual interviews with 8 fifth- through eighth-grade teachers and 2 administrators. The collected data were open coded and analyzed to reveal themes that addressed the research questions. The findings indicated that teachers and administrators expressed a need for more opportunities for collaboration, required additional professional development to address bullying, and had varying views on strategies to address bullying situations. Recommendations include providing more collaboration time and additional training for teachers and administrators on responses to bullying within a PLC. This study may affect positive social change by providing research findings supporting the preparation of teachers and administrators at the study site to address bullying situations by following more closely the processes of a PLC. This information might positively affect school climate and students' feelings of safety at the school.

Abstract The importance of the role of the principal in good schools is acknowledged by many sources. The preparation of new principals is therefore an important factor in ensuring children are educated in good schools. New Zealand does not have a formal system of principal preparation. The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of pre-principalship preparation with the aim of discovering those activities and developments that were useful in assisting teachers to make the transition to successful principalship. The research question addressed in this study is,; What are the elements of pre-principalship preparation that are most useful for potential and aspiring principals in furthering their career aims? Using qualitative methodology, a group of people who had attended the Aspiring and Potential Principals' Pilot run by the School of Education at the University of Waikato, were questioned using semi structured interviews about their experiences. Five of the six were holding principal positions, the sixth was in a deputy principal's position and had some relieving principal experience. The results the research generated indicated that while there were varying needs for potential principals because of their varied backgrounds, there were six useful experiences for all identified. These included, attendance at some form of targeted principal preparation programme, a background of ongoing professional learning, developing networks, developing successful mentoring, experience of models of principalship and support of 'family'. Different people had different levels of benefit from these experiences but they were common to all. It is hoped that this research will give assistance to guiding professional development for the potential and aspiring principals of tomorrow.

This qualitative study offers an in-depth description of a high school professional learning community (PLC) as it focuses on enhancing the teaching and learning of the Grade 9 Applied Mathematics curriculum. The teachers’ goal in this PLC is to implement strategies they believe best meet the needs of their students. Over the course of one school year data was collected during PLC meetings and through individual participant interviews. Data was analyzed and used to answer the following research questions: How is a PLC formed and sustained, and how does it evolve throughout the process of teachers examining their practice? What happens when a professional community of learners comes together to discuss, dissect and reflect on their own practice with the intention of broadening their understanding of teaching mathematics? Analysis of the data revealed that teachers came together through their shared work of teaching in ways that address the needs of students in applied level mathematics. Through external funding and strong leadership and support from the school Principal, this PLC created opportunities to meet and collaborate. During meetings the PLC members discussed their pedagogical challenges, focused on the needs of students and student learning, designed lessons that would specifically target the needs of their students, observed each other teach these co-designed lessons, and finally discussed and reflected on the taught lesson. This process was repeated throughout the year, each time building on lessons learned from previous experiences. Although the PLC members described how being out of their class to collaborate did pose some challenges, overall they described their experience in the PLC as the most powerful professional development of their careers.

The purpose of the study was to examine and evaluate the extent to which the supportive conditions (collaboration, teacher efficacy, shared leadership, and trust) were present in the district's current professional learning communities (PLCs) model, and whether teachers perceived the supportive conditions to be related to improving their instructional practices. This mixed-methods study used Pearson correlation coefficient, multiple regression, and focus group interviews to concurrently triangulate data to answer the research questions. The sample from this study was identified from 600 middle school teachers. Survey participants included 139 teachers and each of the four focus group interviews contained 6 teachers for a total of 24 teachers. Of the four supporting conditions analyzed, trust generated the highest mean (M = 3.41). Results from this study indicate that the supportive conditions for PLCs have a strong correlation (0.10) with the studied district's current PLC model and each specific supporting condition elicits a targeted aspect of professional learning that has a significant impact on teacher instructional practices. Recommendations for future studies include the expansion of this study to include elementary and high school participants and to extend this study to a larger scope of interested districts seeking to improve their PLC structures for improved teacher instructional practices. Expanding this research could build upon the current body of literature as it relates to PLCs, professional learning, and student achievement.

Instructors in higher education are being asked to introduce electronic portfolios (ePs) into their teaching without prior knowledge or experience on how to do it effectively. They struggle with conceptualizing how the eP process connects pedagogy, assessment and student engagement within their courses and programs. Research has shown that instructors need to experience the eP process first hand, within meaningful and situated contexts that enable professional learning. This study explores how instructors make meaning of the eP process in relation to their own professional learning, and subsequently how they construe the eP process’s pedagogic purpose and value for their students. In this context, professional learning is defined as a relational engagement between identity, knowledge construction and professional practice that leads to a transformative understanding of learning as embodied and holistic. Based on a review of the literature on the eP process and theories of professional learning, a group of instructors in higher education were engaged in a shared self-study of the eP process within a narrative inquiry methodology. They used images, video, word clouds and other artifacts to explore and build awareness of the values and beliefs that have shaped their teaching practices. Participants concluded that the eP process promotes multiple competencies linked to “readiness,” the ability to assess new situations and move forward in new environments. Intrinsically formed through iterative cycles of reflection and engagement, “readiness” is a dispositional stance or type of knowing-in-action that can help students bridge the gap between conceptual knowledge learned in classrooms and situated, relational knowledge required for professional practice. The study implications are that the eP process can be used as tool for professional educators to examine their own practices, in order to imagine new ways of learning for their students. / Graduate

Next Generation Science Standards and the Framework for K-12 Science Education encourage teachers to not only change the content of their teaching, but also the way that they deliver it. In order to promote these modern teaching practices, professional development (PD) experiences for teachers need to develop new approaches that enhance the transfer of the PD context into the teachers’ classroom practice. In this research study, professional learning communities (PLCs), defined as collaborative groups of teachers who make their practice visible within their professional learning, are analyzed in a formally instituted series of teacher professional education offerings. Moreover, the setting included a professional learning community composed of teacher-facilitators who were actively engaged as facilitators of other PLCs. The goal of this design experiment was to both explore PLCs as PD models within science education as well as to begin to develop tools for PD that allow teachers to work from within the context of their own classroom. The sources of evidence used in this study included teacher and student produced artifacts and interviews, and written transcripts of the sessions were also examined. All data were primarily explored using methodology taken from grounded theory. This approach facilitated identification of emergent themes that particularly addressed some of the ways that researchers and teacher leaders can work together in the future to make certain that PD and the teachers’ classroom practices are more coherently connected. The following themes were identified: refining the focus of professional learning communities to allow for investigations of student learning in the classroom, especially with an eye towards supporting transparency of practice through artifacts, and the usefulness of cycles of inquiry as a construct for planning professional learning communities. Furthermore, it became clear that there is a need for explicit norms to frame the classroom around what constitutes acceptable explanations and justifications for productive classroom experiences. Among other findings, it is recommended that borrowing from and adapting the work of scholars in sociomathematical norms around the use of explanations can be the basis for a possible framework for improving future studies of teacher professional practice.

This thesis investigates professional learning in a school-based community of science teachers. Transcripts of science staff meetings were analysed using two frameworks. These frameworks relate to the notions of community and professional learning. The school-based community is interpreted in terms of three metaphors of understanding: meanings, practice and identity. Professional learning is interpreted in terms of how the teachers learn the episteme, techne and phronesis of their science teaching. I propose that professional learning occurs when teachers engage in virtues-based personal reflection and/or public discourse around episteme, techne and phronesis in the spaces 'in-between' the metaphors of community. This proposition raises implications for the accessibility of professional learning and the relationship between community and organisational boundaries.