a)Research Statement:                                        

Learning communities (LCs) for professional development have received much attention over the past decade. Research has uncovered various LCs’ characteristics that may encourage teachers to become deeply engaged in their professional development such as: flexibility, openness, prolonged duration, and socioconstructivist foundations (Webster-Wright, 2010). However, all learning communities are not equal (Mullen & Schunk, 2010). The LCs that encourage teachers to engage as professionals are the ones that have been shown to make the school a better place for democracy and inclusion (Servage, 2009). The majority of criticisms aimed at certain types of LCs, particularly professional learning communities (PLCs), derives from the fact that these types of community may be either imposed upon teachers, or serve to implement top-down educational reforms (Ibid.; Meyer, 2002). Our notion of LCs considers the community as a democratic, safe, and inclusive space where teachers have the opportunity to express their voices, discuss their classroom reality, and explore collaboratively various ways to improve their practices (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Meyer, 2002; Savoie-Zajc, 2010).

Although several studies have explored teachers' experiences of professional development in an LC, and how these experiences can be deepened by social constructivist principles, little research has focused on the practices of the facilitator in this type of setting (Steel & Craig, 2006; Webster-Wright, 2009). This paper aims to highlight two researchers’ support strategies. They were facilitators in a LC dedicated to identify best practices in elementary science. The goal is to understand the facilitator’ roles that may provide successful opportunities for teachers’ professional development. As the paper will discuss, implementation of various support strategies helps to establish LC as a living space for nurturing teachers in their professional development needs.

b) Conceptual Framework:

Various typologies have attempted to pinpoint facilitator’s competencies to better guide LCs. Those of Lafortune (2008) and Biémar (2012) provide with excellent guidelines for planning and establishing facilitator’s roles in a LC. Others researchers have attempted to model the processes of support in LCs, and by doing so, to describe the facilitator’s role (Nelson & Slavit, 2008; Leclerc, 2012; Savoie-Zajc, 2010; Vial & Caparros-Mencacci, 2007).

Dionne, Savoie-Zajc and Couture (2013), in a previous research, have proposed a model called Facilitators’ Support Strategies within LCs which sees the LC as an ecosystem and the facilitator as an engineer whose global role is to maintain equilibrium within and between two main systems: the environmental system, which concerns the affective component of the LC, and the change process system (or action system), which deals mainly with participants’ learning and with the adjustment of their pedagogical practices. This vision of conceptualizing LC as an ecological system was shared by other researchers such as Mitchell and Sackney (2011). Furthermore supporting and maintaining the environmental and dynamic balances within a LC seem to be interconnected activities, and appear to be essential to the positive development of a place where “educators can build rich, exciting learning environments and passionate, engaged communities of learners” (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011, p. 35). These sustainable learning communities are places where teachers may learn, develop new methods, and renew their passion and commitment for teaching and learning (Hargreaves, 2010; Mitchell & Sackney, 2011).

This communication aims to extend this understanding of the LC as an ecosystem and to deepen the understanding of what are the main support strategies that are considered most effective for the professional development of teachers involved in a LC.

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