Influence of Professional Learning Community (PLC) on secondary science teachers’ culture of professional practice: The case of Bangladesh

At the end of the second professional workshop, two teachers wanted to discuss some of their difficulties with content knowledge. This became an issue in the third professional workshop. After some discussion, the group decided that each teacher would write one problem regarding their content difficulties on a sheet of paper and then place it in a box. Their responses were diverse and included: how to fish keep alive in the ice river in the winter in the polar region; N-type and P-type semiconductors; periodic table; total internal refraction and critical angle; and, meiosis and mitosis. Teachers were then invited to discuss their ideas about these content difficulties. For instance, to address how fish stay alive in an icy river, teacher 4 explained it in detail with the help of some of the other teachers. Following the explanation, I asked the participants:

Facilitator: Have you understood what you wanted to know from this explanation?

Teacher audience: (No response)

Facilitator: How would we be able to know that you, who placed this issue to discuss, have understood the query?

Teacher 2: (After silence for one minute, with hesitation) I placed this issue [on the table]. I am clear now.

Facilitator: (After taking another topic from the box) Our next topic to discuss is “N-type and P-type semiconductors.

Teacher 5, then, made specific his problem and teacher 11 explained in detail how to respond to the situation. They continued with the rest of topics more comfortably. The remainder of the professional workshop followed this problem solving approach. The above example illustrates how the teacher professional workshops helped teachers to ‘break the ice’ in sharing issues about their practice in more collaborative ways.