Abstract:

Teacher professional learning communities is one of the major issues in the field of teacher professional development and teacher learning. With more than thirty years of development, establishing and developing teacher professional learning communities has been commonly recognized as an important strategy for enhancing teacher learning and improving school effectiveness in the educational policies and school reforms across the world. Accordingly, researchers have extensively examined teacher professional learning communities in different contexts. However, existing studies have rarely investigated the underlying values, epistemological interests, and inquiry intentions held by the research and practices of teacher professional learning communities. Drawing on Habermas’s theory of cognitive interests, we summarized the three inquiry paradigms (i.e., technical, practical, and critical paradigms) and six research discourses (i.e., restructuring, effectiveness, community, cultural, critical, and transformative discourses) in the existing research on teacher professional learning communities, and concluded the understandings of the nature of teacher professional learning communities, research emphases, and developments in each paradigm. Based on this paradigmatic analysis, we presented our attitudes towards various research paradigms, and outlined the directions for future research into teacher professional learning communities in each paradigm.

Key words: teacher professional learning communities, inquiry paradigms, cognitive interests, research discourses