Real World Professional Learning Communities: Their Use and Effects

In a professional learning community (PLC), teachers are organized into teams, committed to meeting on a regular basis to study their teaching strategies and the effects of those strategies on the students in their classrooms. The teacher teams can be of varied form and composition. Whatever the organizational structure, the teams have one goal — that is to improve teaching so that student learning is improved.

Policy developers, legislators, and educational leaders have encouraged the adopt...