A Study Of Professional Learning Communities For Elementary School Teachers In The Context Of Communicative Rationality

Teacher professional learning communities have been on the radar of researchers in China since the 1990s,with an emphasis on how professional learning communities can help teachers’ professional development.Primary education is the foundation stage of national education and teachers are the key leaders.A professional learning community for primary school teachers is an organic organization that embraces the heterogeneity of members’ roles,stimulates a sense of ownership of teachers’ professional development and promotes the achievement of organizational goals.However,the development of professional learning communities for primary school teachers is still plagued by formalized activities,a lack of awareness of teacher cooperation and a lack of communication between teachers.Habermas’idea of interactional rationality,as a kind of rationality that integrates instrumental rationality and value rationality,and its advocacy of inter-subjectivity,effective dialogue and the living world,coincides with the concept pursued by the current primary school teachers’professional learning community.Based on this,this study focuses on the actual operation of primary school teachers’professional learning communities through the lens of interactional rationality.Three primary schools are selected for investigation,and questionnaires,interviews and case studies are used to analyze the current situation in primary school teachers’ professional learning communities,and to seek theoretical guidance for the development of primary school teachers’ professional learning communities through the lens of interactional rationality.The paper provides an overview of the theory of interactional rationality and the professional learning community of elementary school teachers as well as a related study of the constructive logic of both.Combined with related studies,this paper designed five dimensions of elementary school teachers’ professional learning communities:organization and implementation,institutional construction,goal planning,methods and contents,and practical effects to investigate the current situation of elementary school teachers’professional learning communities’ operation.The study found that the elementary school teachers’ professional learning community practice carriers were in various forms,mainly subject learning communities.The internal system construction,goal planning,and content and form of learning community show a good trend on the whole.However,there are still outstanding problems such as teachers’ poor learning effect,insufficient individual teacher empowerment,and teachers’ weak sense of collaboration.The problems identified were analyzed in terms of the lack of attention to teachers’ individual development in schools,the constraints of the interactive environment of elementary school teachers’ professional learning communities,and the lack of a sound organizational system for elementary school teachers’ professional learning communities.Based on the analysis,the development path from the perspective of communicative rationality is proposed:building a learning community based on rational interaction of teachers’ discourse interactions;improving the qualifications of inter-subject interactions in the learning community;establishing the ideal discourse context and community building can be incorporated into teachers’ life world.