Professional identity or best practices?—An exploration of the synergies between professional learning communities and communities of practices

paper attempts to find the synergies between Professional Learning Community (PLC) and Commu-nity of Practice (CoP), with the view to enhance teacher professionalism. Based on the review of litera-tures, we highlight the different motivations of PLCs and CoPs, and the value-assumptions informing the two initiatives. We argue that both initiatives serve critical functions in augmenting teacher autonomy. Although conceptually distinctive, the underpinning values of the approaches to organizing teacher pro-fessional communities are complementary. Therefore, a two-prong approach is proposed. One seeds teacher professionalism through emergent best practices. The other consolidates these best practices into a coherent teacher professional identity through the introduction of structural affordances