Sustained Collaborative Communities
Design Principles for Sustained Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)
This research study traces the evolution of a multi-year, design-based research effort to reimagine teacher professional learning through sustained professional learning communities (PLCs) in Nepal and responds to three interconnected challenges.
First, traditional teacher professional development (TPD) in Nepal is often short-term, lecture-based, centrally prescribed, and non-participatory, offering limited opportunities for teachers to engage collaboratively or shape their own learning. Second, classroom pedagogies remain largely conventional and assessment-driven, leaving little space for approaches rooted in play, storytelling, and making. Third, concerns of culture further complicate this landscape. Teachers’ exposure to educational theory is often mediated through imported Western frameworks and does not always align with the social, cultural, and relational realities of Nepali classrooms. While these frameworks are widely circulated and influential, they frequently remain abstract for teachers and risk marginalizing local ways of knowing and overlook cultural elements, stories, and relational practices that shape Nepali teachers’ professional lives.
To address the three challenges, the study examines how a long-term, iterative professional learning community (PLC) can support teachers in navigating these tensions, providing a participatory, reflective structure for professional growth while simultaneously enabling experimentation with play, making, engineering, and storytelling in real classroom contexts.
From the five iterations of design, we present four interrelated design principles: (1) grounded learning opportunities, (2) multidimensional reflection, (3) sustained, collaborative communities, and (4) curricular iterations. Collectively, these design principles articulate how professional learning can be designed not as a fixed program, but as an evolving ecosystem that responds to teachers’ contexts, constraints, and aspirations.
Additional Resources
- Playful-Engineering Based Learning (PEBL Toolkit) – Phase 2
karkhanasamuha.org.np/resources/the-pebl-toolkit
- Making Space Toolkit – Phase 4
karkhanasamuha.org.np/resources/making-space-toolkit
- Values to Vision – Phase 5
https://suryabikram.notion.site/Value-to-Vision-18276ad4a42c80f2bfc0f376f27c3294
