Does teachers' work in professional learning communities explain variations in their students' achievement scores? Exploring the relationships between professional learning community, teacher and student characteristics

Teachers' professional learning has been, and always will be, a critical thread of research. Over the last decade, however, the research on teacher professional learning has changed in two substantial ways. First, the way teachers learn on the job has changed. In the past, teachers attended one-time workshops, where they received information in a --sit and get" fashion. Today, teacher-learning communities are becoming more of the norm for learning on the job. In addition, today, it is also critical that teachers' learning bolster student achievement. That is to say, evaluators should be able to make direct connections between what teachers learn on the job to the impacts that learning has on their students. This study examined the relationship between teachers' perceptions of professional learning communities, student achievement, and other teacher and student characteristics.The researcher administered the Professional Community Index to 141 teachers during the 2008-2009 school year at 9 southern California schools. In addition to the Index, the teacher collected demographic data on teacher experience, education, certification, and content knowledge. The researcher merged these data with a large, longitudinal data set, which included background characteristics on these teachers' students. The data gathered included student ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English language status, prior achievement, parent education level, and absences. Results from several multiple regressions indicated that student background characteristics explained variations in student achievement. In the first regression, prior achievement scores accounted for approximately 37% of the variations in students' 2008 test scores.The second analysis indicated that once the block of student characteristic variables were controlled, the professional learning community variable explained only a nominal percentage of the overall explanation of scores. While the data for this sample suggested that teachers' work in professional learning communities had little impact on their students' scores, these results do not in anyway suggest that teacher learning is unsubstantial. The work teachers do within these communities may have influences on these students in ways that were not measured in this study or in ways that only long term research may capture.