Teacher collegiality: A comparative study of two subject-based professional learning communities in a secondary school in China

• In Event: Cross-national studies on teaching and teacher education

Proposal

Research Purpose
Teachers are seen as key agents in bringing about changes in teaching and in shaping student learning in school education (Borko, 2004; Lieberman & Mace, 2008; Spillane, 1999). Thus, discovering how to support teachers’ continuous learning to take on new responsibilities and develop new pedagogies is essential in this era of rapid change. Drawing on emerging evidence of the significance of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) on teacher continuous learning (Louis & Marks, 1998; Stoll & Louis, 2007; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008), the concept of PLCs is gaining increasing interest internationally. However, the present knowledge base on PLCs has been drawn predominantly from Western contexts. Yet, how teachers work together in the form of PLCs is not identical in all contexts and cultures. Relatively little analysis has been made of the nature and implementation of PLCs in Asian contexts (Hairon & Tan, 2017; Wang, 2016) such as China, as they have different educational systems and distinctive cultures. The purpose of this study is to investigate the nature of teacher collaboration that illustrates how PLCs work to support teachers’ continuous learning in Chinese schools, in order to enrich the global discussion of PLCs in a non-Western context.

Literature review
The notion of PLCs derives from studies on learning organization (Senge, 1990) and communities of practices (Wenger, 1998). Despite debates over the definition of a PLC, there is substantial agreement that a PLC is a setting in which a group of professionals work collaboratively to address a collective purpose (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008). Although increasing studies suggest that PLCs can enhance teacher learning and student learning, building effective PLCs is not devoid of challenges. A PLC is not only to put teachers in contact with each other. Hargreaves (1994) has described that using administrative directives to push teacher collaboration may lead to “contrived collegiality”. Moreover, cultures of collaboration take much more time, and tend to be more spontaneous, voluntary and unpredictable (Hargreaves, 2013). Thus, developing the collaborative professional cultures of learning is a major challenge to build effective PLCs.
Meanings and interpretations of PLCs vary culture by culture. In China, PLCs for teacher collaboration in school settings were established as a formal structure (i.e., Teaching Research Groups, TRGs) more than 60 years ago. A TRG is a group of teachers teaching the same subject in the same school, and who have regular interactions for educational improvement (Paine & Ma, 1993). Due to the mandatory nature of TRGs, researchers argue “the contrived organization” as its distinctive feature (Wang, 2002; Wong, 2010). Given the limited empirical research on PLCs in China, this research examines the collaborative process of Chinese PLCs from the perspectives of teachers in two subject-based TRGs by proposing questions as follows: 1) How do TRGs operate in school settings? 2) What are the features of teacher collegiality in different TRGs? 3) What factors support and/or impede teacher collaboration in PLCs?

Methodology
A qualitative case study was adopted to examine the research question with a focus on two TRGs-Chinese language and Mathematics (CH-TRG and MA-TRG)-in a junior secondary school in Shanghai. The school enjoys a good reputation in school-based teacher professional development, especially the quality of teaching research group activities.
The data were collected from multiple sources. The first data source was the participants’ interviews. 8 Chinese language teachers, 7 Mathematics teachers and 4 school administrators were formally interviewed to obtain information about the organization and their participation in TRG activities. The second data source was observation and field notes. The author spent around 6 month, 8 hours to 9 hours a day in the field, 5 days a week in 2016 and 2017. 14 collective group activities of teachers in these two TRGs were audiotaped. Besides, the researcher mainly took notes about informal interactions and conversations of teachers in various settings related to TRG practices and their collaboration. The third data source was various artefacts, including videos of public lessons, group meeting records, public lesson plans, and teachers’ reflective papers.
The interview transcripts, together with the observation and field notes, and the material artefacts were then coded for emerging themes, and then grouped into a report of structures, process, practices of PLCs in each TRG. A comparative approach between two TRGs was adopted in data analysis.

Findings and discussion
Findings show that teachers are organized to interact with their peers systematically and uniformly. Teachers in a TRG are required to address a collective topic at designated places on a fixed weekly schedule. Different modes of activities including collective lesson planning, public lessons, theme talks, mentoring are prescribed to support teacher professional learning collaboratively.
Under the same structure, two TRGs present different forms of collegiality; the case of MA-TRG reveals a more contrived and less genuine collegiality, while CH-TRG demonstrates a more genuine and less contrived collegiality. In MA-TRG, teachers provided/received inadequate and limited support to/from their peers in terms of instructional support, open discussion, and material sharing. In contrast, teachers in CH-TRG demonstrated extensive, active and in-depth collaboration among peers. Interrelated factors including group composition, group leadership, social bonding and trust, group tradition influence the levels of teacher collegiality in TRGs.
With specific reference to China, this study provides greater understanding of the actual PLC practices in the Chinese school context. It suggests that teacher collaboration in China is well arranged and structured. This study concludes that the same structure of PLCs can result in variations of PLC process. It argues that it is possible to generate genuine collegiality under strong administrative arrangement. This study demonstrates that the coexistence of contrived and genuine collegiality and both contribute to teacher professional learning to different extents. Group level factors can shape the nature of collaboration, leading to different levels of collaboration. The findings thus indicate the complexity of building effective PLCs.

Author

• Licui Chen, East China Normal University