Teachers' Professional Development at VET – Reflections on Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

Abstract

Recent decades teachers at Danish vocational colleges have been met with high demands in adapting their pedagogy and practice to meet the requirements of new legislation, which require implementation of new pedagogical ideas as well as new ways of teaching and cooperating with colleagues. But teachers often find themselves lacking the necessary time to reflect on how to implement the new ideas and requirements. This condition thus represents a challenge to the success of implementing the demanded changes. In this article, we address the question of what is needed to create environments to support teachers' reflection and their professional development in VET with a specific focus at the potentials of 'professional learning communities' (PLC´s).