Teacher Learning Gains From Participating in Professional Learning Communities: Associations With Interaction Patterns

Objectives: Teacher Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) share and critically interrogate their practice in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning-oriented, growth-promoting way and operatie as a collective enterprise (Stoll et al., 2006, p. 223). Prior research has shown that participating in a PLC potentially contributes to teacher professional development, although results are mixed (Vescio et al., 2008). Although some work has been done pinpointing learning opportunities in teachers’ collaboration (e.g., Horn et al., 2007), there is still a lack of clarity regarding effective types of interaction.
Perspectives: The current study aimed to relate teachers’ learning gains to teachers’ interaction during the PLC meetings, in terms of the conversational moves types and patterns that characterize the interaction.
Methods: Nine PLCs were studied, with 49 teachers from five different secondary schools in the Netherlands. The goal of the PLCs was to collaboratively implement and evaluate differentiated education, facilitated by a researcher/teacher educator. PLCs had four to six meetings, which were videotaped and transcribed for analysis. After the final meeting, teachers completed a questionnaire concerning their learning gains from participating in the PLC, based on the domains of change by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002). Based on the teachers’ answers, four contrasting cases were defined; a high-gains PLC, a low-gains PLC, a mixed-gains PLC with high gains in beliefs but limited knowledge gains (high-beliefs PLC), and a mixed-gains PLC with high gains in knowledge but limited change in beliefs (high-knowledge PLC). These contrasting cases were analyzed in their use of conversational moves, as coded from the video transcripts; utterances were marked as Argument, Elicit, Inform, Listen, Opinion, Rephrase, or Suggest. Besides frequencies, patterns of conversational moves were analyzed using orbital decomposition (OD; Guastello, 2000).
Results: Results showed that participants in general experienced more learning gains in the practical domain than in the personal domains (knowledge, beliefs) and domain of consequence (effects on students; see Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002), F(4, 124) = 10.90, p < .001.
Group members were mostly informing each other, in all groups, but even more so in the low-gains PLC (see Table 1). The high-gains PLC stood out in their openness to each other, reflected in an above-average amount of eliciting, and active listening as well as rephrasing. The mixed-gains PLCs differed from each other in informing (more in the high-knowledge PLC) and in suggestions (more in the high-beliefs PLC).
Interaction patterns of serial informing (I-I-I-I) was the number-1 pattern in all groups. The patterns that came second to tenth showed more differences. The high-gains PLC had active interaction types, including inform-elicit-inform-elicit, alternated with opinions, whereas the low-gains PLC merely showed serial turns of information. The high-beliefs PLC had many serial opinions, showing discussions that may have led to the teachers’ altered beliefs. The high-knowledge PLC did not differ much from the low-gains PLC.
Significance of the study: The findings show that differences in teachers’ learning experiences are associated with differential (patterns in) conversational moves. Facilitators of future PLCs can use this information to steer a group towards effective interaction.