What do Teacher Leaders Value About Regional STEM Professional Learning Communities?
Our hypothesis was that the PDPs would value the FOCUS model of effective instructional leadership (Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles, 1998) underlying the program and their deep identification with the program would characterize their own classroom practices and school leadership. We also wanted to capture attitudes towards the unexpected result of teams of PDPs collaborating across districts to design lessons. Last, FOCUS incorporates a model of a professional learning community aligned with Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) that we expected to see in the responses by the teachers:
"A joint enterprise continually renegotiated by its members functioning by mutual engagement that binds members into a social entity that produces the capability to share repertoire of communal resources"
Our questions going into the research were as follows:
- What do teachers value about the regional network in which they are participating?
- What is unique about the regional network that a school or district might not provide to their teachers?
- What can university partners do to help sustain these types of professional development networks?
