Professional learning communities are receiving attention in research on in-service teacher professional development. Arguments for professional learning communities emphasize teacher learning as a long-term, continuous, developmental and collaborative process. Such learning is viewed as necessary for supporting sustained improvements in teachers’ teaching practices and learners’ learning. The study reported in this thesis drew on these ideas to investigate how mathematics teachers learned in a professional learning community, and how their learning influenced changes in their teaching practices and identities. The study was a pilot for a larger, on-going project at the University of the Witwatersrand. Using the ideas of situated learning theory and data-informed practice, the case study involved a professional learning community of five mathematics teachers and the researcher. The study was conducted in one township high school in Gauteng, South Africa. The professional learning community participated in a year-long professional development intervention, which consisted of a set of developmental and structured professional learning activities. The activities involved analyzing learner errors in mathematics, identifying learners’ learning needs, planning and teaching innovative lessons for addressing the learning needs, and reflecting on how the lessons supported learners’ learning. The study investigated how teacher participation in the opportunities for learning was linked to shifts in their teaching practices and identities. The results show changes in teachers’ practices and their identities. Two teachers made shifts in their mode of teaching, task selection and implementation, and in their ways of engaging with learners’ ideas. Two other teachers made shifts in task selection. The shifts were sustained by one teacher in her teaching of the post-intervention lessons. All the teachers shifted in their ways of identifying themselves as members of communities. During and after the intervention, the teachers identified themselves as members of the professional learning community, and expressed visions of progressively learning together and improving their practice together. The shifts in teaching practice and teacher identity are explained by the opportunities for learning in the professional learning community. The results show how the links among teacher learning, teachers’ teaching practices and teacher identity were supported or constrained by features of the professional learning community.

In response to increasing demands placed on public education, professional learning communities (PLC) have emerged as a means of providing teachers with opportunities to collaborate together. Collaboration has been shown to improve teaching practices and lead to better student outcomes. Many collaborative teams, however, struggle to reach their collaborative potential. Trust has been shown to be an important factor contributing to the success of collaborative efforts. Few studies exist that empirically assess the relationship between team functionality and team trust. This study examines the relationship between these two constructs. A measurement tool was developed by the author to measure PLC team functionality based on five domains of functionality. Team trust was measured by a preexisting tool developed by Costa & Anderson (2010) based on four dimensions of trust. Multiple regression analyses were performed to assess the strength of the relationship between PLC team functionality and team trust. Control factors such as team stability, years of teaching, and principal support were included in the analysis. Findings showed a positive, significant relationship between the five domains of PLC team functionality and the four dimensions of team trust. While individual relationships between domains of functionality and dimensions of trust varied, between 46%-60% of variability in team functionality was explained by team trust. This study demonstrates the importance of trust in collaborative efforts of PLC teams as well as highlights a more complex relationship between the two constructs than previously understood in the literature.

As accountability for public schools continues to increase, educators are continually seeking the best practices in order to assure successful academic achievement, particularly in mathematics. This study focused on the popular reform movement of establishing professional learning communities (PLCs) within the schools, and combined it with a frame of reference from the math teaching context. The purpose of this study was to gain the perceptions of principals and math teachers in successful 5A high schools about the role of the professional learning communities in their schools. For several decades, educators have been trained and continue to be trained on the effective use of professional learning communities in all levels of education. Utilizing a PLC concept requires additional efforts by the school leadership and the teachers. By gaining insight into the perceptions of those in the field, the researcher was able to find common themes, analyze them, and develop recommendations for practice and further research. This qualitative research focused on reviews of literature beginning with early reform movements of forty years ago, which spawned the PLC movement to practitioners and researchers today. Participants were selected from highs schools with a Recognized or higher rating by the Texas Education Agency, and that were also acknowledged for their high performance in mathematics. Three large Texas high schools were chosen, and interviews conducted with twelve participants, three principals and nine teachers. The perspective was narrowed to the field of mathematics because this subject continues to be challenging for so many students as reflected on Texas state scores. After analysis of interviews with the three principals and nine math teachers, five common themes emerged from the data. Structure/time, leadership, collaboration, effective components of the PLC, and professional development were analyzed in the findings. It was evident that these educators saw value in the process of working within a professional learning community and advocate the continuation and development of such a work structure within their schools. The perceptions of these participants validated the research found in the literature supporting PLC's as an appropriate school reform strategy.

Although there are numerous online classes now, yet it is still questionable whether it can achieve the purpose to be initiative, diversified, interactive and collaborative. Taking a look at the current online classrooms, the functions developed by the systems are getting more and more complete; meanwhile, the user-friendliness which is getting improving has brought more convenience for users. However, if there should not be any powerful drive that is pushing from behind, most students would not spend much time getting online to participate in interaction and such classrooms with nearly no students were similar to nonexistence at all. Even for those online classrooms that are more popular among students, the messages left on their bulletin boards are mostly questions for requirements of the class and reposting of some online articles. Not many students can share what they know about these lessons and express how they feel in a profound way, which does not help a lot for learning efficiency of knowledge construction. This study is based on the related theories of learning communities by referencing Tsai, Chung-Yuan¡¦s (Tsai, Chung-Yuan, 2001) instructive interactive design of control, feedback, and facilitate strategies to provide students an online classroom for their spare-time learning by themselves as an experimental platform. Based on a mode of quasi-experiment, it is to group them and manipulate the dependent variables, and to observe the learning behaviors and participation of the subjects in order to empirically test the instructively and socially interactive strategies among teachers and students, students and their peers. For teachers, this study is expected to find an empirically proved strategic mode that can encourage students to have initiative learning and highly participation in the online classroom, and designs a questionnaire aiming at students¡¦ motivations and satisfactions, and the efficiency of group collaborative learning and studying groups. As for students, it is to explore the bottleneck that they have faced and couldn¡¦t break through all the time, then makes a deduction and designs some successful operational strategies to make online classroom work in order to achieve the learning efficacy so that online classroom will not become just another BBS established on the internet platform but can help to fulfill the dream of online learning.

Action research¡XImplementing Knowledge Management for innovative teaching in Elementary Schools Lu-shu Ping Abstuact Education is a process of guiding learning, communication, knowledge exploration, and implementing knowledge to increase values. Experts have been calling for implementing Knowledge Management as a crucial factor to innovate teaching and to maintain excellence in an educational institute. Especially the prevailing trend of Grade 1-9 Curriculum, students have become the center of a classroom, and daily-life experience has been the focus of curriculum guidelines. This innovative curriculum reform has brought great impact on schools and teachers. Therefore, this research aims to find out how elementary school teachers use Knowledge Management to promote innovative teaching and learning process, to construct a Knowledge Management environment, to implement the functioning and development of Knowledge Management, to increase teachers¡¦ expertise and teaching confidence, to fulfill the curriculum guidelines of innovative teaching in the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, to alter the learning culture in an educational institute, to clarify teaching methodology, to encourage teachers to innovate teaching, and to bring out the best of every student. There are four goals for this Knowledge Management in Shin-Shin Elementary School: 1. To create a beneficial and positive environment for Knowledge Management in Shin-shin elementary school; 2. To discuss the functioning factors for Knowledge Management in Shin-shin Elementary School; 3. To analyze the process, reflections, and influences of applying Knowledge Management in Shin-shin Elementary School; 4. To make a conclusion based on the research findings, and propose concrete suggestions for other schools to apply; In this action research team, there are 6 teachers from the Knowledge Group, 4 formal teachers, one student teacher, and one substitute teacher. They used interpretive action research, and the researchers played the roles of ¡§group leader¡¨ and ¡§knowledge chief.¡¨ Also, they are promoters of knowledge management and observers of different styles of teaching. They jotted down and recorded all the teaching process, categorized the records and shared the information through the Internet. Furthermore, they discreetly recorded the observing journals and reflection journals, held curriculum conference and teaching demonstration meeting, communicated and shared information with one another, and finally used Triangular Examination to proofread those data to increase reliability in analysis. The following are the conclusions and suggestions we have from this research. Constructing Knowledge Management 1. Sufficient knowledge of communication to create a common sense of Knowledge Management at school. 2. Choose assistants to deal with details and filing. 3. Create a cooperative and sharing culture, and the premise for this is to cultivate an open and trusting atmosphere. 4. Use every Wednesday to enhance teachers¡¦ information of Knowledge Management. 5. Make use of the advantages in the organization, integrate resources, and set up network environment. 6. Use the budget well to renew appliances in information technology. Operating Knowledge Management 1. Build up the entrance to Knowledge Map. 2. Use outside resources as knowledge data. 3. Cultivate prospects as Information-Seed-Group. 4. Set up encouragement and bonus strategies to execute Knowledge Management. 5. Assign appropriate Knowledge Chief to assist with teaching information sharing. 6. Do research and interview carefully before choosing candidates for Knowledge Group. Process and Reflection 1. Teachers who are engaged with knowledge learning group should be full of motivation to learn and grow. 2. Sharing teaching experience is the result of making implicit knowledge explicit. 3. Using knowledge management to enhance teachers¡¦ innovative teaching. 4. Organize Knowledge Group to share thematic instruction design, integrated curriculum, and new models of innovative teaching. 5. Using classroom observation indicators to find out teachers¡¦ creative teaching. 6. It is a qualitative change for teachers to better develop expertise and innovative ideas. Factors that influence teachers to engage in knowledge management and teaching innovation 1. Teachers¡¦ positive attitude to engage in cyber-learning. 2. To make teachers¡¦ implicit knowledge explicit. 3. The leading and coordinating of the Knowledge Chief. 4. The spiral system created by personal and organizational knowledge 5. The knowledge and power stored in the database system 6. Teachers¡¦ expertise and professional awareness 7. The effects of promoting Knowledge Management and teaching innovation Suggestions 1. It is beneficial for personal knowledge management and teaching innovation when both researchers and teachers cooperate in Action Research. 2. Every teacher should be a Knowledge Manager. 3. Organize the environment and mindset for Knowledge Management, cultivate the knowledge learning culture, and store sufficient power for knowledge database. 4. Operate Knowledge Management, fulfill curriculum and teaching contents in order to share and innovate. 5. Find out like-minded members who are strongly motivated for innovative teaching, and it will be smoother and easier to achieve the goal. 6. Use school meeting to design related procedures for Knowledge Management and invite experts for counseling and guidance to promote teachers¡¦ professional expertise in teaching innovation. 7. Develop a system of indicators for Knowledge Management for one¡¦s own school, so that we can evaluate the results of the research and innovation. 8. It is feasible for schools to use knowledge management to promote teaching innovation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-111). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This study attempted to explore the effect of inter- and intra-personal perceptions and practices of graduate students on their academic motivation from a Self Determination Theory perspective. Students in a large research university were surveyed to determine whether there is any association between their sense of learning community, the need for relatedness, and their reasons to be in graduate school. This study provides evidence to support the importance of the fulfillment of the need to belong in learning community. Differences between international and non-international students represented when they were engaged in their coursework as analyzed by using Ryan and Deci’s (2000) Self Determination and Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory. / text

Conference proceeding from the Living the Future 6 Conference, April 5-8, 2006, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson, AZ. / In the fall of 2003, a new Director of Libraries at Binghamton University outlined a vision for transforming the University Libraries into a student centered learning community. This required reorganization of the Library public services departments, with an emphasis on improved staff morale and leadership, in order to set public services on a positive, user centered path. Within the first three months of my arrival in January 2005 as the new Associate Director of Public Services, facilities related situations dictated the merging of the Reserves, Circulation and ILL service points. This was to occur while simultaneously planning was under way for the first phase of an Information Commons collaboration between the Libraries and Computing Services. These transitions were in addition to the ongoing process of combining Reference and Access Services in a branch library, and were furthered influenced by a number of pressing matters, some predating the new Library Administration, and some set in motion by the transitions themselves taking place amid the shifting formal and informal organizational changes occurring in the Library. This session will focus on 3 specific examples of change, as described above, in the first year of reorganizing and energizing Public Services at Binghamton University Libraries and will utilize elements from the Three-Phase Transition Model (Endings, Neutral Zone, and New Beginnings) for managing the changes and transitions.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how teachers discuss pedagogy and learning in the context of a professional learning community in an elementary school. This understanding has the potential to assist principals and teachers to establish professional learning communities that use their time productively. Study participants belonged to a fifth grade professional learning community. Data sources included video and audio recordings, transcripts, field notes, interviews and artifacts. The data were examined for Episodes of Pedagogical Reasoning (Horn, 2005) which was the unit of analysis for the study. Episodes of Pedagogical Reasoning are units of teacher-to-teacher talk where teachers show their comprehension of a concern in their practice. One finding from the data analysis indicated that although the professional learning community in the study did not follow the "ideal" PLC model, the teachers used the time they were given to accomplish what they needed to do in the course of implementing the Common Core Standards. Another finding was the teachers use of practical talk (Doyle & Ponder, 1978) in determining how best to implement the Common Core Standards. Their practical talk focused on instrumentality and congruence. Instrumentality is defined as a change proposal that must describe a method in a way that depicts classroom contingencies. If the procedure fits the way a teacher normally conducts classroom activities, then it is congruent.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1992. / Includes tables. Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Elizabeth Kasl. Dissertation Committee: Stephen Brookfield. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 310-320).