Creating professional learning community through appreciative inquiry approach

Schools always strive to improve the quality of education by strengthening, and making the teaching and learning process more effective. For this aspect, school provides opportunities to the teachers to bring effectiveness in their performance by arranging professional development sessions or workshops. However, teachers require continuous support on regular basis for their capacity building. Thus it requires developing a culture of professional learning community (PLC) that not only provides support to teachers on regular basis for their development, but also builds a collaborative learning environment for the teachers. With this objective, this study explored the factors that were required for creating the environment based on PLC in the school particularly in the ECD context. Further, this study also identified the processes that helped to build PLC using appreciative inquiry approach. In addition, the support of appreciative inquiry as an approach for building PLC was also measured. In this regard, eight research participants were selected who were involved in four stages of appreciative inquiry i.e. discovery, dream, design and destiny. The data revealed that trust, collaborative learning and reflective dialogue were some of the factors that are required for creating a PLC environment. However, three processes for initiating PLC culture were included which are classroom teaching and observation, constructive feedbacks and reflective dialogue sessions. At the end, this research found that appreciative inquiry approach was significant as a value-added tool that helped to build the collaborative environment in the school and provided participants an opportunity to share their skills and expertise as well as their dreams and imaginations with each other