STEM Teacher Learning Communities: International Examples and Issues
In the U.S., both the fields of professional development at large and teacher induction within it embrace the goal of establishing learning communities. Seminal national documents in mathematics and science education similarly call for collaboration, and some documents move beyond collaboration to encourage learning communities and other kinds of communities.
We have seen a few examples of learning communities among U.S. mathematics and/or science induction programs that we studied. But the most compelling exemplars of roles for learning communities in teacher induction appeared abroad. We observed strong learning communities in every country that we studied outside the U.S., and there were varied kinds of such communities among them.
