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

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Proposal

I am a PhD graduate from the University of Hong Kong, who passed the oral defense at the end of September in 2018. This research proposal is developed based on some research findings of my PhD project.
Research purpose: Drawing on emerging evidence of the significance of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) on teacher continuous learning (Louis & Marks, 1998; Stoll & Louis, 2007), the concept of PLCs is gaining global interest. However, the present knowledge base on PLCs has been drawn predominantly from Western contexts. Relatively little analysis has been made of the nature and implementation of PLCs in Asian contexts (Hairon & Tan, 2017) such as China, as they have different educational systems and 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 and research questions:
The notion of PLCs derives from studies on learning organization (Senge, 1990) and communities of practices (Wenger, 1998). A PLC is generally considered as a setting in which a group of professionals work collaboratively to address a collective purpose (DuFour, DuFour, & Eaker, 2008). Despite its significance, building effective PLCs is not devoid of challenges. 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). Developing the collaborative professional cultures of learning remains a major challenge.
In China, PLCs were established as a formal structure (i.e., Teaching Research Groups, TRGs) for teacher collaboration more than 60 years ago. A TRG is a group of teachers teaching the same subject in the same school and interacting regularly for educational improvement (Paine & Ma, 1993). Due to the mandatory nature of TRGs, “the contrived organization” was considered 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 influence teacher collaboration in TRGs?
Methodology:
A qualitative case study was employed with a focus on two TRGs-Chinese language and Mathematics (CH-TRG and MA-TRG)-in a junior secondary school in Shanghai. The data were collected from multiple sources in 2016 and 2017. First, semi-structured interviews with 19 participants-8 Chinese language teachers, 7 Mathematics teachers and 4 school administrators-were conducted to obtain information about the organization and their participation in TRG activities. The second data source was observation. The author spent around 6 months in the school, observed and audiotaped 14 collective activities of two TRGs, and took notes on informal interactions of teachers related to TRG practices and their collaboration. Third, various artefacts, including group meeting records and public lesson plans were collected. The data were 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 on a fixed weekly schedule through participating in prescribed activities to learn 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 inadequate and limited support to their peers in terms of instruction preparation, open discussion, and material sharing. In contrast, CH-TRG demonstrated extensive, active and in-depth collaboration among teachers. Interrelated group-level factors including group composition, leadership, social bonding and trust, and group tradition influence the levels of teacher collegiality.
This study provides greater understanding of the actual PLC practices in the Chinese school context. It suggests teacher collaboration in China is well arranged and structured. It further argues that it is possible to generate genuine collegiality under strong administrative arrangement. However, the same structure of PLCs can result in variations of PLC process shaped by group-level factors. The findings thus indicate the complexity of building effective PLCs.

Author

• Licui Chen, East China Normal University