Physics Teacher-Leaders' Learning in a National Program of Regional Professional Learning Communities

Abstract

We studied the learning of high-school physics teacher-leaders in a national Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) program that operates using a "Fan Model": the teacher-leaders' PLC is led by a team from the Weizmann Institute of Science, while they simultaneously lead regional PLCs of physics teachers all over Israel. The learning sequence of one learner-centered activity was chosen as the context for this study. We developed a theoretical framework: Physics Knowledge for Teaching and Leading (PKTL), which we used for a micro-level discourse analysis, together with the Knowledge Integration (KI) perspective. The results show that the evidence-based learning of a new learner-centered activity fostered the learning of physics and a rich array of other aspects of teacher-leaders' knowledge. The teacher-leaders' PLC turned out to be a meaningful, supportive, and enriching learning environment. We suggest that our program can serve as an effective model for the professional development of both teacher-leaders and teachers in regional PLCs.