Abstract:
Professional learning communities are becoming an established form of professional learning in New Zealand. Recent education policies in New Zealand have encouraged schools to form networks of professional learning communities across schools. These policies have been written in response to emerging evidence which suggests that schools working together collaboratively to solve problems could raise student achievement. However this research does not investigate the effect of competing initiatives on how teacher-leaders make sense of their learning situated across multiple professional learning communities that they will be involved in as part of a network. A qualitative case study was used to explore how teacher-leaders made sense of their professional learning in multiple professional learning communities. Teacher-leaders' intended learning was compared to their actual learning and how they made sense of it during one school term. Interviews were conducted with the teacher-leaders and principal to ascertain the intended structure and content of their professional learning. Minutes of meetings and documentation relevant to them was triangulated through interviews with the teacher-leaders to identify what they actually learned and how they made sense of that learning. The findings of this research suggest that a shared understanding of professional learning is affected by teacher-leaders' prior learning, belief systems and the clarity of the intended learning. Competing initiatives across multiple communities made it difficult for the teacher-leaders to identify what it is that they were learning or make sense of it so that they could report a change in their practice. However, a well-co-ordinated school demonstrating high levels of trust enabled the teacher-leaders to co-construct a more coherent professional learning programme across the network. While co-ordination enabled the co-construction of more coherent professional learning for the teacher-leaders, it also helped them to make sense of what they were learning. The act of streamlining a great range of intended topics into a few topics across the network was an act of sense-making in itself.
