Designing and Validating a Model of Professional Learning Community for Secondary Technical and Vocational Schools

The present review aims at designing and validating a model of Professional Learning Community for the technical and vocational schools of the upper secondary level.This research is conducted through a qualitative approach and applies the method of Grounded Theory. A Targeted Selection approach was applied for selecting the documents, including all academic sources related to the subject, which constituted the research statistical population of the study. Sixty titles were selected. In addition, Chain Sampling, one of the methods of Targeted Sampling was applied to select the individuals for the interviews and validation sections. Using the Theoretical Saturation method, seventeen individuals for designing the model and for the first phase of validation and forty-two individuals for the second phase of the validation (which assesses the extent to which the model can be executed) participated. Also, the data collection methods employed in each phase included a Semi-Structured Interview for the first phase and a Researcher-Made Questionnaire for the second phase. For analyzing the documents, Qualitative Content Analysis and for analyzing the interview transcripts Inductive Analysis and the coding of Grounded Theory was applied. The results demonstrated that the structure of the professional learning community includes 21 elements that were identified. The model is delineated in 5 steps Plan, Establish, Implement, Modify and Assess, and is validated in two phases. Validation results illustrated a remarkable degree of consistency between the interviewees in the first (structure and elements of the model) and the second (the degree to which the model is executable) phases