The project developed a collection of sixteen practical activities for setting up Professional Learning Communities and facilitating inquiry and reflection within them. The activities address facilitators, school leaders, teachers, student teachers and teacher educators alike, and are suitable for PLC at any stage — from a group meeting for the first time to an established community seeking to deepen its work.
Purpose and Approach
The aim was to translate the project’s theoretical and empirical findings into usable resources for professional dialogue, collaborative learning and inquiry-based reflective practice. The collection is organised around the seven dimensions of facilitating competencies identified in the conceptual framework: relational, communication, collaboration, learning and knowledge building, inquiry and reflection, organisational, and digital. Each dimension is represented by one or more activities, with the relational and the inquiry-and-reflection dimensions covered most extensively.
Development and Structure
Each partner institution developed activities for the dimensions it had taken responsibility for. The activities follow a common structure that states the focus, the duration, the prior PLC experience assumed, the goals, a step-by-step description of the process, the dimensions addressed and the intended learning outcomes; the tools required for inquiry, reflection and design are supplied in an appendix to each activity.
The materials were piloted by the partners together with head teachers, teachers, student teachers, school advisors, teacher trainers and university lecturers. Their experiences and feedback were used to revise and finalise the collection.
Conclusions and Implications
The collection demonstrated that facilitating competencies can be addressed through concrete, transferable formats rather than remaining at the level of principle. The activities are designed to be adapted to the specific context of a group and work in face-to-face as well as online and hybrid settings; several address digital collaboration explicitly. They also form the practical basis of the project’s modular training course.
The activities were published in English and in the partner languages and are freely available in the Results section of this website.