An Examination Of The Relationship Between Suburban Public Elementary School Teachers Reports Of Individual Teamwork Knowledge Skills And Abilities And Their Schools As Professional Learning Communities

The intent of this exploratory study was to examine the relationship between suburban public elementary school teachers' reports of their core competencies to function in a team, and their reports of the extent to which teachers and administrators in their schools engaged in practices known to support the development of well-functioning professional learning communities. Two surveys were administered to elementary school teacher volunteers from a single suburban school district in a northeastern state based on the concepts of Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) by Stevens and Campion (1994a) and an assessment of professional learning communities by Olivier, Hipp, and Huffman (2008). Study participants' reports of their core competencies to function in a team were measured using the Teamwork-KSA (Stevens & Campion, 1993). The reports of the extent to which teachers and administrators in their schools engaged in practices known to support the development of well-functioning professional learning communities were measured using the Professional Learning Communities Assessment-Revised questionnaire (PLCA-R; Olivier et al., 2008). Data from the surveys were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. A cross-sectional survey design was selected to answer the research question. Forty two public elementary school teachers from 2 schools within 1 district in a northeastern state participated in the study. Procedures associated with quantitative research were used to analyze the data, which consisted of preparing, organizing, and analyzing the data from the purposeful sample of convenience. This yielded 13 findings. Conclusions were drawn and recommendations for future research are presented. Study participants' overall reports of their core competencies to function in a team (Stevens & Campion, 1993) and their reports of the extent to which teachers and administrators in their schools engaged in practices known to support the development of well-functioning professional learning communities (Olivier et al., 2008) revealed no significant positive relationship. However, an inverse relationship was revealed in one school between Shared Personal Practice (Olivier et al., 2008) and Interpersonal KSAs (Stevens & Campion, 1993). Importantly, there was a significant positive relationship between Collective Learning and Application (Olivier et al., 2008) and Communication KSAs (Stevens & Campion, 1993).