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Makale Özeti:
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Educators need to take action in terms of
acquiring, creating and transferring their knowledge to
students based on the professional learning community
approach. It involves building a learning community in
their classrooms. Researchers and professional
organizations have cited the Professional Learning
Community (PLC) process as having the potential to
impact student achievement positively. As the current era
of high stakes accountability has left educators struggling
to improve the quality of teaching and learning, PLCs have
been recommended to foster collaboration and make
educator practices public. Therefore, the purpose of this
study was to examine educator’ descriptions of their PLCs
to determine if the practice of the principles influenced
student academic performance in language teaching. A
quantitative research design was implemented to explore
the extent to which educator training in PLC principles, the
actual practice of PLC principles, and student achievement
in language teaching were related. A survey was utilized to
collect data regarding 365 educators’ perceptions of the
existence of three dimensions and seven sub-dimensions of
PLCs within their institution. Final years of language
course students’ data were examined to measure student
achievement in language learning, and inferential statistic
by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach was used
to look for possible relationships between the variables.
Statistical examination indicated PLC members who
observed peers, provided feedback on instructional
practices, worked with colleagues to judge student work
quality, and collaboratively reviewed student work to
improve instructional analysis were more likely to improve
their quality of teaching. Further results indicated positive
correlations between the dimensions belonging to values,
vision and mission, a dimension of subject to support:
relationship and structural and also dimensions of
collective learning and applications. Finally, the model
achieved the goodness of fit indices which is resulted in
Chisq/df= 2.185; GFI=.980; CFI=.991; TLI=.983;
RMSEA=.065)
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