Designing and Deploying A Professional Learning Community (PLC) Organizational Routine: Bureaucratic and Collegial Arrangements in Tandem

Our analysis explores how local educational policymakers redesigned the formal organizational infrastructure of their 14 elementary schools to support teacher collaboration and learning. In particular, we examine the design, deployment, and workings of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) routine intended to support teachers’ on-the-job learning about instruction. The PLC routine was part of a broader system-wide infrastructure redesign effort to support teachers’ implementing a more inquiry approach to teaching mathematics in elementary (primary) schools. We show how participation in the PLC routine structured teachers’ advice and information interactions about mathematics. We also describe how bureaucratic and collegial arrangements interacted in the implementation and performance of the bureaucratically mandated and monitored PLC organizational routine that relied on collegiality arrangements for institutionalization. Based on this analysis, we theorize how bureaucratic and collegial arrangements work in tandem, rather than in opposition or independently, in transforming how school staff work with one another.