1. Research question

•  What is the impact of inter-school PLCs on teachers’ professional development (including their perceived satisfaction; knowledge, skills, and attitude; and application)?
• What is the impact of inter-school PLCs on turnaround schools (including teachers, students, and parents) through teachers’ personal professional development?

2. Conceptual or theoretical framework

2.1 Definition and characteristics of Professional Learning Communities

A PLC refers to an organization that connects teachers and communicates and learns with each other voluntarily (Hardy, 2002). Regarding the key elements of the PLC, different scholars have different views, the core of which mainly includes four aspects: shared values and Vision (Louis & Marks, 1998; Stoll et al., 2006), collective learning (Senge, 1990; Prenger et al., 2017; Huijboom et al., 2021), shared and supportive leadership (Hord, 1997) and supportive conditions (Hord, 1997; Stoll et al., 2006).

2.2 Inter-school Professional Learning Communities

The PLCs we studied were networked, where school groups work together to share resources or to improve the quality of professional learning and the school’s ability to continuously improve (Katz & Earl, 2010; Díaz-Gibson et al., 2017; Muijs, 2015). Compared to within-school PLCs, inter-school PLCs have the advantages of a wider range of resources and expertise. Teachers in inter-school PLCs have more opportunities for self-reflection and group reflection in practice and are more involved in challenging and interactive professional learning (Lieberman, 2000).

2.3 The effect of inter-school Professional Learning Communities

2.3.1 Teacher Professional Development

The study adopts the descriptive framework of teachers’ professional development sequence (Desimone et al., 2013) to measure the impact of PLCs on teachers’ professional development. In the context of PLCs, the first level of teacher professional development is how PLCs participants feel about various aspects of professional learning, that is, their satisfaction with the PLC’s process and outcomes. The second level involves participants’ learning in PLCs, including acquired knowledge, skills, and attitude changes resulting from professional learning. The third level refers to teachers’ behavioral changes after participating in PLCs, that is, applying the acquired knowledge, skills and attitudes to their practice. Finally, student outcomes may change in the long run due to changes in teacher-level learning and behavior.

2.3.2 Teacher Job Satisfaction

The Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) data also showed that teachers who participate in cooperative learning more frequently have higher self-efficacy and job satisfaction (OECD, 2014). Pietarinen et al. (2015) found that teachers have a strong sense of work efficacy in PLCs, show high job satisfaction, and can effectively promote their professional development.

2.3.3 Student Achievement 

Within the framework of educational effectiveness research (Reynolds et al., 2014), effectiveness is defined by students’ learning outputs (eg, achievement, motivation). The quality of school education is directly related to student achievement, so teachers must support their teaching performance through effective professional development (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). Research by Beninghof and Leensvaart (2016) showed that teachers who planned and taught together developed better teaching strategies and could focus more clearly on students, which in turn improved student achievement.

2.3.4 To better reflect student outcomes, this study also took parental feedback into account. 

In addition to focusing on student outcomes, it is also necessary to pay attention to the feedback from key stakeholders (e.g., students, parents, teachers, and school leaders) to help assess the quality of schools more comprehensively (OECD, 2013). Therefore, the study uses teachers, students and parents as the evaluation objects of school improvement. For inter-school PLCs, the purpose of teacher learning is to transfer knowledge, skills, attitudes and outcomes to the participant’s school (Prenger et al., 2020), thereby driving the development of the school.

1.Instruments The data came from three sources: semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and artefacts. Teachers’ perceived satisfaction with inter-school PLCs, changes in attitudes, and the acquirement and application of knowledge and skills were mainly interviewed. The study examined the feedback of school development stakeholders on the development of the low-performing school through satisfaction questionnaires. The documents of and public information relating to the Group were used as a complement to the interviews and questionnaires. 2.Sample logic This study used criterion sampling (Suri, 2011) to select sample PLCs. Sampling went through two stages. The first stage was to select a qualified Education Group to ensure that their reforms were orderly and institutionalized. Based on the evaluation results of Education Groups by the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Education, 22 Education Groups in Guangzhou were selected as the first batch of provincial-level high-quality elementary Education Groups. In the second stage, we mainly selected Groups with a high-quality inter-school PLC. By comparing the evaluation materials, we found that Group A took the development of inter-school PLCs as the main strategy of school collaboration and achieved good results. Therefore, the inter-school PLC of Group A, which included three independent schools, was selected for this study. The research was conducted from November 2020 to November 2021. Group A, formally established in December 2018, included School H (high-performing school), School M (medium-performing school), and School L (low-performing school). Group A established an inter-school PLC which was named an Advanced Teacher Training Program (ATTP) in October 2019. This ATTP has 57 participants recruited from the member schools, with a learning period of one year. 3.Participants We used stratified random sampling (Omona, 2013) strategies to sample a total of 39 educators, including principals and teachers, to conduct in-depth interviews of each between 40 and 60 minutes. The research team distributed questionnaires to a total of 236 teachers in the Group, and 202 questionnaires were recovered. All students from grades 1 to 4 and their parents were included in the study. A total of 2,531 students participated in the survey, and 2,106 copies of the survey were collected. A total of 2,579 parents participated in the survey, and 1,729 copies sent back were valid. 4.Data Analysis We conducted ANOVAs for the effect measures. All analyses were performed using SPSS25.0. The interview data were transcribed verbatim based on the audiotapes. NVIVO.11 was used to encode, archive, and analyze the interview data.

1.Participants has shown progress in professional development. Inter-school PLC participants were generally satisfied with the inter-school PLCs, which stimulated teacher innovation and provided more opportunities for professional learning. Positive changes took place in the professional attitudes of members. Inter-school PLCs influenced teachers’ reflection and the adjustment of their professional development goals and career ideals. Moreover, the changes in the teachers’ professional attitude toward inter-school PLCs also spread to other teachers in the three schools and affected their teaching concepts and practices. The professional knowledge and skills of the participants in inter-school PLCs were moderately developed. Members generally felt that they had made some progress in pedagogical content knowledge and teaching theory. In addition, inter-school PLCs also had positive implications for teaching practice. Members continuously improved the quality of teaching through the combination of theory and practice. 2.Participants from weak school improved their schools by cooperating and sharing resources across school boundaries Inter-school PLCs have a positive impact on teacher job satisfaction in “weak” schools. Inter-school PLCs not only made teachers in low- and medium-performing schools more active in participating in interscholastic professional development activities, they also improved those teachers’ professional identity and self-efficacy. Teachers of low- and medium-performing schools cooperated with excellent teachers in the process of learning activities and shared resources through the platform built by the Education Group, bringing excellent learning experience back to their schools. The students in the low-performing school had the highest satisfaction. They had more positive recognition for their teachers’ teaching, and their parents also affirmed the teaching ability and attitude of teachers who participated in inter-school PLCs. In addition, inter-school PLCs made the low-performing school students feel confident in their learning status, and parents of the low-performing school also believed that the inter-school PLC promoted the development of students’ comprehensively.

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