Conference Agenda

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are increasingly understood as both collaborative structures and as dynamic sociomaterial practices through which professionals collectively shape, contest and stabilise educational routines (Horn & Little, 2010). Their potential lies in supporting ongoing professional learning, strengthening collective agency and improving teaching, all of which contribute to improved outcomes. Yet, their impact remains uneven and fragile (DuFour & Fullan, 2013; Stoll et al., 2006). Inspired by the ECER 2026 theme of ‘Knowing and Acting’, this symposium argues that the question is not simply whether PLCs ‘work’, but rather, what kinds of knowing-acting relations PLCs enact, for whom, and under what conditions. The organising tension is therefore both epistemic and organisational: PLCs can become infrastructures for inquiry and responsibility, or can drift into routinised performance, compliance, and reductive discussions of ‘data-driven improvement’. We examine this tension by treating PLC activity as constitutive of evolving practice ecologies, not discrete interventions.

We focus on teacher development as a challenging ‘test case’ because the pressures are concentrated. However, the logic applies to any organisational field under scrutiny and is therefore pertinent to Organisational Education traditions which treat organisations as sites of professional learning where subjectivities and legitimacy are co-produced through routines, artefacts, and authority relations (Göhlich, Schröer, & Weber, 2018). In such ecologies, learning is reproduced or constrained through the interplay of routines, artefacts, professional identities, and institutional expectations (Horn & Little, 2010). For example, in the Nepal pilot (paper 2) teachers initially experienced uncertainty that became productive, supporting shifts in agency, collegiality, and problem diagnosis. In contrast, in the Danish case (paper 3), the integration of instructional coaching and lesson study foregrounds how new observation routines and systematic pupil-data practices can expand collective reflective dialogue, yet risks performativity.

The symposium positions PLCs as material-discursive inquiry practices that can mediate where authority and knowledge production sit. Paper 1 frames this as an orientation in which knowing, being, and acting responsibly are co-constitutive (Barad, 2007), and where professional dialogue becomes a ‘doing that thinks’. This lens reveals what more instrumental PLC framings often miss: that PLCs are not neutral containers for learning, but sites where what counts as evidence, expertise, and legitimate improvement is actively made, and where some professional knowledges can become ‘unthinkable’ under reductive research and accountability discourse (Foucault, 1980; Bernstein, 2000). We synthesise three parallel strands in the PLC literature: i) PLCs as sociomaterial infrastructures, ii) PLCs as travelling and/or translated theory across unequal institutional and cultural logics, and iii) PLC design as a methodological problem of combining forms (e.g. dialogic inquiry, lesson study, coaching) without collapsing inquiry into procedural compliance. Across the symposium we address the question: How can the dynamics, values and purposes of the PLCs be understood theoretically, empirically and methodologically across contrasting partnership and design configurations?

Drawing on an example from a pedagogic conceptual innovation (Plant Positivity), paper 1 reframes PLC dialogue as ethico-ontoepistemic professional inquiry in a longitudinal university-school partnership. Paper 2 analyses a pilot project in Nepal - introducing Close-to-Research PLCs - as travelling and transgressive theory, showing how PLCs can become intercultural infrastructures of becoming. Paper 3 examines a Danish cross-school PLC integrating instructional coaching and lesson study, specifying design affordances and identifying limits in relation to evidence-use and reflective routines. Across the papers we aim to develop a sharper account of PLCs as knowing-acting infrastructures whose effectiveness depends not merely on their presence but on how they organise translation, authority, evidence, and responsibility. This has evident implications for how we structure collaborative development in Organisational Education practice both across and beyond Europe.

While we have made significant progress in our understanding of the role of dialogue in student learning and dialogic pedagogy (e.g. Mercer et al., 2020; Asterhan and Schwarz, 2016; Howe, 2023; Marjanovic-Shane, 2023), our understanding of the role of dialogue in relation to professional development is less well understood. This paper reports on an aspect of the Close-to-Research (CtR) Partnership which, now in its fifth year, is a longitudinal university-schools partnership in the East of England. Our purpose is to understand the dynamics, values and purposes of Professional Learning Communities in the context of sustained dialogic organisational partnerships. We adopt a posthuman, new materialist, and relational approach; framing knowing, being and acting responsibly as co-constitutive. The resulting ethico-ontoepistemic material-discursive practices transform dialogue into a relational being-with, and the inquiry activity within PLCs into a practice-based, interventionist, reflective doing that thinks (Barad, 2007). As a diffractive and respons-able ‘professional dialogic inquiry’, PLCs overcome some of the more reductive aspects of research discourse which make some (professional) knowledges ‘unthinkable’ (Foucault, 1980; Bernstein 2000). Drawing on this theoretical framing, the name ’close-to-research’ emerged to complement to the ’Close-to-Practice Research’ approach, popularised by the British Educational Research Association (Wyse et al., 2021), which places the locus of research-informed development activity on research. Instead, we shift the centre of gravity so the hidden structure becomes ’professionals enacting research-informed practice’. In this context, practice is not ’applying’ research but is a ’knowing-doing-being’ research: practice–research are intra-actively co-constituted (Barad, 2007). This reversal signals a profound reconfiguration of where activity, authority, and knowledge production are located. In a Close-to-practice research context the locus defaults to research. In contrast, in Close-to-Research practice partnerships, the locus is practice itself: a site of ongoing knowledge production, with research operating as a reflexive mode within that practice. This ontological re-framing of the field dissolves the gap between research and practice avoiding the ’impact theatre’ and ’pseudo co-production’ that we see elsewhere (Bandola-Gill & Smith, 2022). We exemplify this shift by drawing on a CtR-PLC project that led to the emergence of a new way of knowing–being–doing in A-level Biology teaching which reframes the constructs of Plant Blindness (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999, 2001) and ‘Plant Awareness Disparity’ (Parsley, 2020) as ‘Plant Positivity’: a qualitatively ‘different’, ‘professional’ construct that is more helpful for A-level teachers when promoting plant-based contexts for teaching Biology concepts.

Bandola-Gill, J., & Smith, K. E. (2022). Governing by narratives: REF impact case studies and restrictive storytelling in performance measurement. Studies in Higher Education, 47(9), 1857–1871. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1978965 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. Rowman & Littlefield. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977. Pantheon Books. Howe, C. (2023). Classroom interaction and student learning: Reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 11(3), A26. https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2023.549 Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2023). A soul-searching assembly: Vignette. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 11(2), A165–A197. https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2023.360 Mercer, N., Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2020). The Routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education. Routledge. Parsley, K. M. (2020). Plant awareness disparity: A case for renaming plant blindness. Plants, People, Planet, 2(6), 598–601. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10153 Wandersee, J. H., & Schussler, E. E. (1999). Preventing plant blindness. The American Biology Teacher, 61(2), 82–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/4450624 Wyse, D., Oliver, S., Poblete, X., & Brown, C. (2021). Education research and educational practice: The qualities of a close relationship. British Educational Research Journal, 47(6), 1466–1489. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3626

This paper examines the emergence of Close-to-Research Professional Learning Communities (CtR-PLCs) as locally rooted, theoretically agile levers for organisational development in Nepali schools. Building on the CtR project piloted in the East of England, the Kathmandu partnership represents an example of how educational theories, practices, and professional identities travel and transgress the institutional logics they encounter (Said, 1983; Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996). Rather than importing a fully formed model, the Nepal pilot became a site of co-creation in which teachers, university academics, and school leaders collectively re-made CtR-PLC practices through the textures of Nepali classrooms, communities, and educational histories (Coburn, 2005; Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012). In this sense, the project enacted the kind of knowing–being–doing that Barad (2007) frames as ‘world-making,’ and the iterative processes of becoming that Deleuze (1994) attributes to relational transformation. Drawing on work with sixty teachers across four diverse schools in Kathmandu Valley, the paper explores how CtR-PLCs operated as dialogic spaces in which theory travelled not as a fixed package but as a boundary-crossing process (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). Imported ideas were read through Nepali pedagogical realities: overcrowded classrooms, complex sociologies of students’ home lives, the fragility of school–community relations, and the deep legacies of top-down, cascade training models. Teachers described early uncertainty about a model that refused to provide solutions and instead repeatedly returned them to their own questions, contexts, and evidence. Yet this discomfort became productive. Across the project, teachers reported shifts in agency, collegiality, and professional identity. They began to analyse rather than inherit problems, to explore rather than presume the causes of learning difficulties, and to collaborate in ways that reorganised the relational fabric of their schools (Kirkman et al., 2026). The pilot also illuminates tensions that can arise when theory travels. CtR-PLCs unsettled dominant assumptions about training, authority, expertise, and ‘best practice.’ In doing so, they opened space for transgressive reinterpretations that were distinctly Nepali: teachers visiting students’ homes to understand complex socio-economic barriers, schools jointly constructing student-profile ‘tissues’ to ground pedagogical decisions, and groups re-centring the primary task of learning over the inherited routines of delivery. Rather than a transplantation of English practice, CtR-PLCs became a relational, intercultural pedagogy of becoming. The paper argues that such travelling theories create new ethical and epistemic possibilities for teacher development - possibilities that emerge only when practice itself is recognised as the locus of knowledge production.

Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011). Boundary crossing and boundary objects. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 132–169. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654311404435 Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203153185 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Coburn, C. E. (2005). Shaping teacher sensemaking: School leaders and the enactment of reading policy. Educational Policy. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904805276143 Czarniawska, B., & Joerges, B. (1996). Travels of ideas. In B. Czarniawska & G. Sevón (Eds), Translating organizational change (pp. 13–48). Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110879735.13 Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press. Kirkman, P., Gnawali, L., Gautam, G., Ho, C., Bhatta, C., Caws, D., Barber, D., & Wall, S. (2026). Nepal close-to-Research professional learning communities (CtR-PLC) pilot evaluation report. Anglia Ruskin University. Said, E. W. (1983). The world, the text, and the critic. Harvard University Press.

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are designed to strengthen both pupils’ learning and teachers’ professional learning (Stoll et al., 2006). PLCs can be developed through action research and Lesson Study (LS) represents one well-established form of action research that can support the development of PLCs (Lewis & Hurd, 2011). The role of facilitators or teacher leaders is emphasised as crucial in both PLCs and LS (Harris et al., 2017; Lewis, 2016). This paper examines how instructional coaching (IC) can be meaningfully integrated with both PLCs and LS. Like PLCs and LS, instructional coaching has been shown to be an effective strategy for supporting school-based teacher learning (Kraft et al., 2018). Our research question is: How can instructional coaching be integrated with Lesson Study within a professional learning community in ways that enhance teachers’ professional learning? Empirically, the paper draws on a case of a PLC established across four Danish primary schools in the subject of science. The PLC consists of five instructional coaches who are learning how to facilitate Lesson Study cycles in their own schools together with their teacher colleagues. We designed and followed the PLC over a one-year period, collecting qualitative data through observations, audio recordings of meetings, and interviews with the coaches. Preliminary findings indicate that participation in LS adds new dimensions to the coaches’ instructional coaching practices, particularly with regard to classroom observation and the systematic collection of pupil data to support collective, reflective dialogue. The role of being explicit ‘users of data’ appears to be relatively new to the coaches. Furthermore, participation in a PLC that integrates IC and LS expands their professional learning opportunities, as instructional coaches often have limited access to collegial spaces for knowledge sharing with peers in similar roles. The paper discusses the strengths and limitations of combining different approaches to teacher professional learning, drawing on recent meta-analyses of factors influencing the effectiveness of professional development initiatives (Sims et al., 2025; Visscher et al., 2025) and a forthcoming integrative review (Kiær & Albrechtsen, forthcoming).

Harris, A., Huffman, J. B., & Jones, M. (2017) (Eds.). Teachers Leading Educational Reform: The Power of Professional Learning Communities. Taylor & Francis. Kiær, K. & Albrechtsen, T.R.S. (2026, forthcoming). Lesson Study and Instructional Coaching: An integrative review. Kraft, M. A., Blazar, D., & Hogan, D. (2018). The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence. Review of Educational Research, 88(4), 547–588. Lewis, C., & Hurd, J. (2011). Lesson Study Step by Step: How Teacher Learning Communities Improve Instruction. Heinemann. Lewis, J. M. (2016). Learning to lead, leading to learn: How facilitators learn to lead lesson study. ZDM, 48(4), 527–540. Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Goodrich, J., Van Herwegen, J., & Anders, J. (2025). Effective Teacher Professional Development: New Theory and a Meta-Analytic Test. Review of Educational Research, 95(2), 213–254. Stoll, L., Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Wallace, M., & Thomas, S. (2006). Professional Learning Communities: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Educational Change, 7(4), 221–258. Visscher, A. J., Dmoshinskaia, N., Pellegrini, M., & Rey-Naizaque, A. (2025). (When) do teacher professional development interventions improve student Achievement? A meta-analysis of 128 high-quality studies. Educational Research Review, 49, 100742.