Outcomes of District-Led Professional Development Embedded within Biology Professional Learning Communities Among Three High Schools in a Single School District

Abstract

District-led Professional Development (DLPD) holds great promise for cost-effective and sustained PD for K-12 faculty but is often enacted as whole-group, one-shot meetings on topics (e.g., 21st-century learning) non-specific to teachers’ grade levels and content areas. Alternatively, Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) provide on-site and ongoing collaborative support to teachers by common grade levels or content areas. To best leverage DLPD and PLCs, an exploratory multiple case study was conducted to examine how three separate high schools’ biology PLCs had received and enacted DLPD in teaching 21st-century skills. Desimone and Pak’s five core features of effective PD were used as the theoretical framework to explore teachers’ perceptions of the semester-long DLPD through interviews, lesson plans, PLC agendas, and classroom observations. Case analyses found that participating biology teachers perceived that the coherence and content focus was the greatest affordances of having 21st century focused DLPD in their PLC. Collective participation, active learning, and duration were revealed respectively. Results suggested teachers had incorporated the 21st-century skill of communication the most and creativity the least in their practice. Findings suggest that DLPD embedded within PLCs provide contextualized PD opportunities to high school biology teachers when there is sufficient time and opportunities for translating knowledge into practice.