Implementing and adjusting the idea of ”Professional Learning Communities"

Professional Learning Communities (PLF) is an idea developed in Anglo-Saxon educational traditions. The last years municipalities in Denmark have adopted and adjusted the concept in projects involving primary and lower secondary levels in the Danish public school. Those projects are initiated from the top level and are involving all actors in public schools. The research project in this presentation focus on the implementation and adjustment of PLF to schools at upper secondary level. The project is bottom up driven in the sense that local managers and teachers have been involved in the decision to participate in the project and to point out the topics to be qualified: differentiation in the teaching and supervision among teachers. The aim of the project is to map the challenges to implement and adjust PLF to education at upper secondary level. The theoretical framework is PLF as it is described and implemented in the Danish context (e.g. Albrechtsen, 2010; Marzano, R. et al. 2015). PLF stress common values and visions, data based teaching, learning communities and students learning. The methodological design is based on action research and is running from October 2018 to June 2019 at one selected school, and thus employ a case study design where participation, action and critical reflection are the core of the approach (Dich, 2015). As an action research project the researcher have the roles to teach, to coach and to collect data (Brydon-Miller & Aragón, 2018). Some teachers are observed in their teaching. At the end of the project, team members and the team leader will be interviewed. The expected preliminary findings is that the team implement PLF but there might be some challenges. These challenges relates to roles in the team, to collection and development of teaching based on data. The challenges might also concern the organizational level in aspects such as time and framework to teach differentiated. The relevance to Nordic educational research is that PLF is an example of the impact of societal change where teaching is based on an idea and evidence gained from other educational cultures.