When Professional Learning Communities Become Consequential for Classroom Practice: Configurations of Teacher Learning and Classroom Enactment

Although professional learning communities are positioned as promising structures for teacher learning, the link between community inquiry and classroom enactment remains uneven. This qualitative multiple case study examined how school-level conditions, facilitation approaches, and community learning processes combine to shape teacher learning and classroom enactment across six professional learning communities. Using within-case and cross-case analysis, the study identified recurring mechanisms and configurations of conditions shaping enactment. Four cross-case mechanisms were consequential: leadership involvement as legitimacy, community stability as a basis for shared language and trust, facilitation as shaping learning and inquiry depth, and the use of classroom representations as anchoring pedagogical reasoning in practice. Drawing on these mechanisms, the study proposes a typology of three community-classroom configurations: integrative, adaptive but constrained, and fragmented or emergent, and argues that meaningful enactment depends on stable, legitimate environments in which practice becomes a shared object of collective reasoning.