Against the backdrop of increasingly diverse student learning needs, adaptive teaching practice has become a critical issue for improving classroom instructional quality and promoting educational equity. However, the associative pathway linking teachers' perceived professional learning community (PLC) culture to adaptive teaching practices, as well as its boundary conditions, has not been adequately examined within the Chinese context characterized by the coexistence of strong institutionalized collaboration and high accountability pressure. Drawing on professional capital theory, the present study used data from the Chinese (Shanghai) lower secondary teacher sample of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2024 ( N = 1283) and adopted a cross-sectional associative design to examine the association between perceived PLC culture and adaptive teaching practice, with instructional self-efficacy tested as a mediator and work stress as a moderator. The results indicated that (a) perceived PLC culture was significantly and positively associated with adaptive teaching practice; (b) instructional self-efficacy served as a statistically significant partial mediator of this association; and (c) work stress significantly attenuated the positive association between perceived PLC culture and instructional self-efficacy but did not significantly moderate the direct association between perceived PLC culture and adaptive teaching practice. These findings provide association-level empirical evidence regarding the applicability of professional capital theory to the Chinese educational context, identify contextual boundaries of the professional capital transformation pathway, and carry implications for optimizing teacher collaboration and alleviating work stress to support adaptive teaching practice.
Qian et al. (Thu,) studied this question.