Study On Autonomy Of High School Teacher Learning Communities

Professional learning communities have been acknowledged to be an effective way to facilitate teachers' professional development in China.Relevant research and practice have been carried out.Based on the case analysis of Novice High School English Teachers Learning Community of Siming District,Xiamen,this study explores the issue of autonomy in high school teachers' learning communities.Major findings are the following:1.There shows a lack of autonomy in high school teacher's participation in professional training.The reasons for this are not being able to specify one's development needs,dissatisfaction toward the current training system,a rigid learning environment as well as alack of incentive mechanism.2.Inspired by the self-organization theory and the theory of autonomous learning,this study comes up with a learning-community based training framework to improve teacher autonomy and thus facilitate teacher development.3.A protocol is designed to evaluate the autonomy levels of a teacher learning community.Autonomy levels of teachers can be evaluated by observing teacher's performance during team building and training participation.Autonomy levels of the team can be evaluated by observing the functioning mechanisms and the interactive patterns of the learning community.4.Based on the evaluation of the above-mentioned training framework,this study offers suggestions to further promote teacher autonomy in professional learning communities for high school teachers,which include implementing policies to encourage organizing teacher learning communities,providing funding and support for current teacher communities,strengthening incentive mechanism and platform construction,developing a training needs testing system,and creating a more thorough teacher's training scheme.