Arts , Humanities & Social Science

Abstract

In a small rural school district in the southern region of the United States, a newly hired superintendent in a traditionally high-performing school district recognized the need for increasing collaboration and depth of instructional knowledge both within and across the district’s schools. To address the concern, the superintendent introduced a district-wide Professional Learning Community (PLC) initiative as a means of increasing instructional collaboration. Simultaneously, a teacher from the district attending a graduate program for licensure in school administration was studying the Internal Coherence (IC) framework in her degree program. She was learning that the framework provides a pathway for continuous improvement by placing the development of collective teacher efficacy for high-impact instruction at its core (Forman et al., 2017). Seeing the connection between the IC framework and the district’s PLC initiative, the teacher/leadership candidate began conversations with the superintendent regarding the connection and potential value of framing the district’s PLC initiative with the IC theory of practice. This paper describes how the district utilized a PLC model as an improvement strategy; it also details how the teacher/leadership candidate connected the work of the PLCs to the IC framework. In doing so, she recognized evidence of teachers’ increasingly robust instructional insights and increasing depth of collaboration. The paper presents a case for extending and deepening the work of PLCs when the work is framed by a theoretical model such as the IC framework. The argument is based on the work of Ford et al. (2020), noting that without anchoring improvement work in a sound theoretical model, the work may lack clear direction, resulting in weakened potential for sustainability. The case was developed from interviews with the district superintendent and the teacher/leadership candidate. Participant names have been excluded to preserve anonymity.