Teacher Collaboration Emerges as Hidden Engine Behind Problem-Based Math Learning

When Ghana’s West African Examinations Council reported that the pass rate in Core Mathematics collapsed from 66.86 percent in 2024 to 48.73 percent in 2025, alarm bells rang across the country’s education system. The Chief Examiner’s Report pointed to a familiar catalogue of weaknesses: students struggling to interpret diagrams, translate verbal statements into mathematical expressions, and apply reasoning to real-life problems. Now a new study from researchers at Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development in Kumasi offers a striking clue about what might be missing from the classroom equation — not more lectures, but more structured teacher collaboration.

The research, published in Frontiers in Education, examined whether Professional Learning Communities, or PLCs, are associated with mathematics teachers’ implementation of Problem-Based Learning, a learner-centred pedagogy that Ghana’s Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service have written into recent curriculum reforms. PBL asks students to construct mathematical understanding by grappling with authentic problems through inquiry, collaboration, and critical thinking, while teachers act as facilitators rather than transmitters of procedures. The catch is that this shift demands far more of teachers than individual effort: it requires sustained opportunities to design lessons together, analyse student thinking, and build shared confidence in unfamiliar instructional territory.

Led by Rose Ampomah, with Benjamin Adu Obeng and Francis Ohene Boateng, the team adopted an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. In the first phase, they administered a structured questionnaire to 86 mathematics teachers and school administrators across three public Senior High Schools in the Atwima Kwanwoma District of the Ashanti Region, retaining 83 valid responses for quantitative analysis. The sample included 66 mathematics teachers and 20 administrators, among them heads of department, assistant headmasters, headteachers, and PLC coordinators. In the second phase, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 mathematics teachers, five purposively selected from each school, to explain the statistical patterns in depth.

The questionnaire measured PLC participation through 25 items spanning five dimensions drawn from DuFour’s influential model: shared mission, vision and values; collective responsibility for student learning; collaborative culture; collective inquiry; and continuous improvement. A separate 10-item scale assessed PBL implementation, covering teachers’ use of authentic problems, student inquiry, collaborative learning, facilitation, mathematical reasoning, and real-life applications. All items used a five-point Likert scale. Exploratory factor analysis supported the intended structure, with all 25 PLC items loading most strongly on their theoretically intended factor and the PBL items forming a single dominant factor. Internal consistency was acceptable to good, with Cronbach’s alpha of .811 for the PBL scale, and Harman’s single-factor test suggested common method bias was not a substantial concern.

The headline numbers were high across the board. Teachers reported high PLC participation overall, with a mean of 3.47 on the five-point scale, and high PBL implementation, with a mean of 3.48. Shared Mission, Vision and Values recorded the highest dimension mean at 3.50, while Collective Inquiry was lowest at 3.45. But the study’s central finding came from a multiple linear regression: the five PLC dimensions jointly predicted PBL implementation with R² = .424, F(5, 77) = 11.345, p < .001. In plain terms, PLC participation accounted for roughly 42 percent of the variance in how thoroughly teachers embraced problem-based instruction — a large effect, with observed statistical power exceeding .99.

Not every dimension carried equal weight. Collective Responsibility for Student Learning emerged as the strongest individual predictor, with a standardized coefficient of β = .317, p = .001, followed by Shared Mission, Vision and Values (β = .278, p = .004) and Collective Inquiry (β = .263, p = .005). Collaborative Culture and Continuous Improvement, by contrast, did not significantly predict PBL implementation once the other dimensions were controlled. The researchers offer a telling interpretation: collaboration alone does not automatically translate into instructional change. Teachers’ descriptions of PLC collaboration in the interviews centred largely on logistical activities — sharing lesson plans, instructional materials, and navigating the Annual Pedagogical Plan — rather than sustained, pedagogically focused inquiry oriented towards PBL. Purposeful collaboration aimed at improving student learning, the findings suggest, matters more than frequent interaction.

The interviews illuminated how this worked in practice. Teachers described weekly PLC meetings as spaces for collaborative lesson planning, professional dialogue, and reflective practice that built their confidence in designing authentic mathematical problems and facilitating group work, inquiry activities, and student presentations. One teacher explained that colleagues shared teaching resources during PLC meetings and worked together to develop materials when they lacked them. Participants also highlighted exposure to technological tools such as GeoGebra and Maple Learn as a valuable route through which PLCs strengthened their instructional repertoire. These accounts align with Wenger’s Community of Practice theory, which holds that professional competence develops through mutual engagement in a joint enterprise rather than isolated individual learning.

Yet the study is equally candid about the barriers. Teachers identified inadequate instructional time, limited resources, difficulty developing authentic problems, and students’ weak critical thinking abilities as constraints on PBL implementation. The PLCs themselves faced structural and motivational hurdles: many teachers lacked laptops needed to participate fully, some colleagues did not see the value of PLC participation, coordinators were sometimes unfamiliar with the new curriculum, and schools lacked shared projectors and computers for disseminating ideas. One teacher put it bluntly, noting that most teachers do not have the laptops that help them participate in PLC activities, while another called for monitoring and sensitisation because many teachers do not see the essence of the meetings.

The authors are careful about what these cross-sectional, self-report findings can and cannot show. Because both predictors and outcome came from the same questionnaire at a single time point, the regression results should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects, and the findings from one district may not generalise to all Senior High Schools in Ghana. The researchers also acknowledge that some non-mathematics-teacher administrators’ responses to the PBL scale should be read with caution. Future work, they suggest, should employ longitudinal or experimental designs and investigate additional factors such as teacher self-efficacy, pedagogical knowledge, school leadership, and resource availability.

Still, the implications are hard to ignore. For school leaders, the message is that PLC activities should be deliberately structured around shared instructional goals and collective accountability rather than administrative or examination-focused agendas. For the Ghana Education Service and curriculum policymakers, the study warns that rolling out PBL-oriented reforms without corresponding investment in purposeful PLCs, adequate instructional time, and resources is unlikely to yield the intended classroom change. As Ghana’s mathematics results continue to fluctuate, the evidence points to a deceptively simple lever: teachers who learn together, with shared goals and collective responsibility, are far better equipped to teach mathematics in ways that students can actually use.

Subject of Research: Education Research

Article Title: The role of professional learning communities in teacher implementation of problem-based learning in teaching senior high school mathematics

Article References: Ampomah, R., Adu Obeng, B., & Ohene Boateng, F. (2026). The role of professional learning communities in teacher implementation of problem-based learning in teaching senior high school mathematics. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1960615. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1960615

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1960615

Keywords: professional learning communities, problem-based learning, mathematics education, Ghana, teacher collaboration, Frontiers in Education, role, professional, learning, communities, teacher, implementation