Suffocation: New Teachers and the Professional Learning Community

• In Event: Teachers' Affective Experiences

Abstract

Long considered an individual profession, one of the mind and creation and interaction with students, teaching has become a community effort. Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) once thought to enhance the teaching profession by allowing individual teachers to experiment, be observed, gain feedback, and read and discuss the latest research have become mechanisms of control. This is particularly true of the new teacher often concerned about contract renewal and heavily influenced by more senior members of their departments, teacher independence and creativity, rather than supported and encouraged, particularly in areas of a justice-oriented and more critical approaches to teaching are often extinguished. Borrowing data from a larger, longitudinal, multi-year, multi-case study examines how new self-identifying social justice social studies teachers were influenced by and attempted to resist the stranglehold of the Professional Learning Community as they experienced them.

Author

• Brian Gibbs, Member