Collaboration between University and Public School System
PLCs for us
This project seeks to investigate the characteristics of productive, sustainable professional learning communities (PLCs) and support teachers’/instructors’ PLCs in Cyprus. It focuses on the public education system in Cyprus and higher education in Cyprus, seeking to collaboratively bring together experts from these two systems in order to provide a detailed, comprehensive investigation of the current state of PLCs in Cyprus and internationally, identify good practices and investigate the needs for supporting and sustaining PLCs in these communities as tools for teachers’/instructors’ professional learning, growth, and development. These investigations take a system-wide perspective, as they will include stakeholders from both the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and the European University Cyprus. Knowledge-how and experiences are being exchanged between experts and researchers from the two education systems. Our investigation will focus on the PLC coordinator level and the teacher/instructor participant level, adopting a double-decker approach that will produce knowledge, research-validated materials, methods, and tools, and research results to sustainably implement PLC in the context of public school and higher education in Cyprus and beyond. Through this process, the project addresses the teachers’/instructors’ needs, and design and provide comprehensive training to PLC coordinators to further support this process of professional learning. Lastly, the project seeks to identify PLC practices that were widely used during the covid-19 quarantine, and investigate using such practices in a productive and meaningful way in the post-covid-19 era.