Professional Learning Community’s of Teachers Conceptualization in the Context of Research of Learning Organization

Abstract

This article deals with conceptualization issues of teacher professional learning communities. Scientific problem, addressed in the article, is presented by analysing world’s scientists and national laws of education. In which the need of learning community, and the suggestion that teacher professional learning communities are the most effective way to reach it is declared. In the first part many definitions of teacher professional learning communities and various definitions of the concept are analysed. The analysis is divided in to 2 groups, where the first one is about definitions of teacher professional learning communities, which is shown in the table, ant the second one shows the characteristics of teacher professional learning communities. In the second part of article foreign and national scientists are discussed, who researched definitions of learning organization. It is found out that there are significant amount of research about school as a learning organization, city as a learning organization, learning organization, but these researches do not defines teacher professional learning communities. After defining the characteristics of learning organization, the characteristics of teacher professional learning communities and learning organization were compared according to the scientific literature. A figure was created, showing mentioned differences and similarities of characteristics. Keywords: teacher professional learning community, learning organization. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/su.2015.38