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Programs of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are gradually becoming significant frameworks for enhancing teachers’ professional development and for elevating students’ performances and motivation. This study discusses theoretical and practical perspectives manifested in the design and enactment of innovative middle-school science and high-school physics PLCs: ‘Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs)’, ‘Scholarship of Teaching and Practitioner Research’, and ‘Boundary Crossing’. The PLCs were carried out as a collaboration between academic teams at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and practitioners, and involved sharing and collaborative analysis of teachers’ practice and students’ learning. Exemplary case studies, carried out in the middle school science and physics high school PLCs, demonstrate main characteristics of these PLCs. The study on the processes and outcomes of the PLCs indicates that teachers became more attentive to students’ conceptual understandings and needs. Teachers enriched their pedagogical content knowledge, their content knowledge, and their reflective stances towards their practice. A top-down approach, which characterized the initial interactions in the PLCs, has been gradually transformed into interactions and collaborative learning, leading to a ‘change in roles’, which involved a more symmetric sharing of responsibilities between the participants. These interactions within the PLCs created an evolving ‘network model’ of knowledge transmission. |
