The national network of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for Physics Teachers

Leading team:

• Prof. Edit Yerushalmi
• Dr. Smadar Levy – Head of the Physics Teachers Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)
• Kana Ofir – Leader, Teacher Leaders’ PLC
• Kobi Shvarzbord – Leader, Teacher Leaders’ PLC

Project team:

• Smadar Avidan, leader of Beer Sheva PLC
• Tatyana Shuldiner, leader of Beer Sheva PLC
• Avraham Merzel, leader of Jerusalem PLC
• Efrat Blau Barak, leader of Jerusalem PLC
• Kana Ofir, leader of Jerusalem PLC
• Asi Nahir, leader of Hod Hasharon PLC
• Nava Haviv Estrugo, leader of Hod Hasharon PLC
• Amit Yosovich, leader of Rishon Lezion PLC
• Daphne Cohen Brener, leader of Rishon Lezion PLC
• Galina Podalov, leader of Ramat Gan PLC
• Larisa Shachman, leader of Ramat Gan PLC
• Bracha Shindler, leader of Haifa PLC
• Shalev Epelboim-Dabran, leader of Haifa PLC
• Abed Hegazi, leader of Carmiel PLC
• Marwa Keis, leader of Carmiel PLC
• David Shani, leader of Sunday online PLC
• Lulu Gera, leader of Sunday online PLC
• Keren PeteL, leader of Monday online PLC
• Lior Yosub, leader of Monday online PLC
• Esti Ensbacher, leader of Tuesday online PLC
• Guy Raviv, leader of Tuesday online PLC

Former Project team:

• Prof. Emeriti Bat Sheva Eylon
• Dr. Esther Bagno – Former Head, the Physics Teachers Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)
• Dr. Hana Berger – Former Leader, Teacher Leaders’ PLC
• Esther Magen – Former Leader, Teacher Leaders’ PLC

Secretariat and Administration:

Jenna Kaufmann

Brief

The national network of physics teachers’ PLCs have been operating for 15 years, since 2011, with the following goal in mind:

1. Promoting the professional development of physics teachers in Israel;
2. Addressing the needs and difficulties of physics teaching;
3. Enabling physics teachers to collaboratively examine their teaching as well as their students’ learning;
4. Directing physics teaching in Israel towards a more student-centered approach.

The program is structured around a “Fan model”, with a PLC of teacher leaders and 10 nationwide regional PLCs (around 300 physics teachers from all over Israel, about 30% of all high-school physics teachers in the country).

The professional development of PLC teachers is designed according to well-established, research-based pedagogical guidelines, in an evidence-based approach. The learning process includes explicating the teachers’ views, goals and perceptions, and engaging them as learners with new instructional strategies, implementation in classrooms, and collaborative reflection on their classroom experiences in a supportive and none judgmental learning environment, with peers who share similar experiences.

The contents of the program are renewed every year for the benefit of the large majority of PLC teachers who participate several years in a row. Every year has 2-3 annual focal themes, each spanning 3-4 PLC meetings. To encourage implementation by such a large number of teachers, they are provided with activities which relate to a variety of examples in different areas of the curriculum, different grades, and in accordance with the specific period during the school year.

A central role of the PLCs is to strengthen the teachers’ resilience - that is, their capacity to channel difficulties they encounter and view them as means to an end, exploring different approaches to fulfill their professional goals. For example, changing lab instruction and narrowing the gap between desired and prevailing lab norms involves changing teachers' priorities by setting new learning goals and helping teachers change their orientations towards these goals. This was one of the annual themes in the PLCs since 2019. The design consisted of lab and PD activities that centered on Deliberation Labs (DLs). To address the constraints and enable large-scale implementation, the DLs were based on familiar experiments that were restructured to give students more agency in specific aspects of the experimental design. The research results showed that most teachers perceived the PLC activities as enriching their considerations regarding experimental design. Teachers were more highly motivated than expected to implement the DLs given the strict curriculum and time constraints of the school environment. The collaborative reflection helped the teachers to acknowledge conflicts between deeply rooted orientations that were identified (e.g. "lab serving theory" and "restricting agency") and the new goals and to discuss how to resolve the conflicts.

Another annual theme in the PLCs is gamification. Despite the positive effects on student motivation and learning outcomes, there are still widespread concerns that "playing games is merely fun" and has no added value, thus making teachers hesitate about incorporating games into their teaching. We developed six Phys-Cards games, designed as summative, hands-on activities aimed at organizing knowledge of physics concepts through a “compare and contrast” task on specific topics. Surveys and an analysis of teachers' reflections showed that the teachers acknowledged the contribution of the Phys-Cards games to students’ conceptual understanding, knowledge organization and collaborative learning.

The PLCs program has a national impact and has been acknowledged as a sustainable and scalable professional development framework , as well as one of the central factors in the rising number of students choosing to major in physics (Ministry of Education, 2017).

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