EXPLORING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES IN MALAYSIAN’S SCHOOLS

Abstract

Part of the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 outlines teachers’ transformation into their profession of choice. To enable this transition, Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) has been established to assist in developing high quality teachers who can achieve their full potential. One of the key elements of PLCs is peer coaching. However, even though the implementation of PLCs spans a large number of schools across the country, findings show shared values and practice dimensions contained within peer coaching as a core element only show moderate to low levels of engagement among teachers (Abdullah et al., 2014; Ismail et al., 2014). Therefore, this ongoing study will investigate whether peer coaching benefits teachers and contributes to their professional development. This mixed method approach study will consider teachers’ perspectives on peer coaching implementation, commitment and self-efficacy using questionnaires (Mowday et al, 1979; Rajab, 2013; Schwarzer et al., 1999). Teachers' observation on the implementation of peer coaching will be collected through semi-structured interviews with the teachers to explore the role of supporting the peer coaching programme in schools and to consider how the findings relate to the use of peer coaching as a PLCs strategy. This study will also explore how peer coaching is practised by secondary school teachers and focus on the impact of teachers’ commitment and self-efficacy. Results from this study will be useful for policy makers both at school and at national level in supporting PLCs and retaining quality teachers.