Week 25: Practice

Communities of practice are formed when “ a group of people, who share a passion for something they know how to do, interact regularly to learn how to do it better”  (Knox, 2009).  What I found interesting is that Wenger suggests that some of these communities are “so familiar that [they] often escape our attention”  (Wenger, 2011, p.3).  I guess, in the past, I’ve been guilty of not fully understanding the part I was playing in these practices.  But luckily I didn't lose any sleep over it, because Wenger then goes on to say that “when [the CoP] is given a name and brought into focus, it becomes a perspective that can help us understand our world [or our learning or our student’s learning] better” (Wenger, 2011, p.3).  So then I began to understand that this is about being aware of and recognising these conversations where we “share experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems” (Wenger and Snyder, 2000, p.140).

Schools are in the business of learning.  Wenger (2011) uses the metaphor of constellations to describe how community of practices (CoPs) may exist within larger or interconnected communities of practice and how each takes care of different yet specific features within an organisation. My school will have a number of CoPs operating “ to create, expand and exchange knowledge and to develop individual capabilities” (Knox, 2009).  In fact, upon reflection, I am beginning to wonder when during my teaching day am I not in engaging in a CoP?

Initially I felt I should reflect upon my Mind Lab group as my community of practice because it seemed to embrace more of Wenger’s (and consequently my) ideas...and perhaps it still does as he argues that managers (insert principal here) cannot mandate CoPs.  He also goes on say that CoPs differ from teams.  Furthermore, he says that it is “the organic, spontaneous and informal nature of CoPs makes them resistant to supervision and interference” (Wenger and Snyder, 2000, p.140).  It is not hard to see why I didn’t exactly envision my syndicate as fitting any of those constructs.

After enduring team meetings lasting until 5:30 pm each week... seemingly only concerned with the sometimes mindless babble of administrators, I was not feeling the CoP vibe of my syndicate. I mean how could the endless team agendas crammed full of camp and gala days and health and safety and discos and who isn’t going out on duty on time... (You get my point?)  How can all of that be considered a community of practice?  What I eventually decided was, it doesn’t.  But, thankfully, once in awhile, in spite of admin mumbo jumbo, we have time to talk about how we plan to enhance our teaching practice and student learning.  

And finally, my community of practice reveals itself within our weekly team meetings...and also in the morning chats on the way to get a hot chocolate...between mouthfuls of lunch...and after school emails when we should be putting our feet up and relaxing.  So fully integrated into our repertoire of daily teaching that we don’t even recognise it for how special it truly is. We are four dedicated teachers who try our best be effective 21st century educators.  We care about the students we teach and every day endeavour to figure out how to use best practice to help them fully engage with the curriculum.

Our  Year 5 and 6 syndicate has worked together for a number of years and have developed and established a bond of trust.  We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and utilise these whenever possible.  We are used to sharing our thinking and ideas and we support and challenge these ideas.  We analyse data we have collected, identify students achieving below expected levels and talk about how we need to make shifts in our practice to accelerate the learning of these students. We try to clearly establish goals with an understanding of urgency and expectancy to meet these targets.  We create tables and graphs to show and monitor student progress.   We have developed ideas about barriers we feel students are confronted by and have brainstormed potential strategies.  We use research and revisit resources we already familiar with. We talk about our successes and we talk about our failures.  Now we have a range of strategies at our disposal for these students.

It is within these conversations that I feel most productive and like I am doing my job; what I am employed to do and why I really teach. It is in these moments that I stop making a mental checklist of other jobs that I might enjoy doing more and remember why I took on this mammoth task.  Now...where did I put my duty roster again?

Knox, B. (2009). Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making them Grow. [video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhMPRZnRFkk

Wenger, E. (2011). Communities of Practice: A Brief Introduction. Retrieved from https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/11736?show=full

Wenger, E. and Snyder, W. (2000). Communities of Practice: The Organisational Frontier
Harvard Business Review. January-February 2000, pp. 139-145. Retrieved from http://www.rareplanet.org/sites/rareplanet.org/files/Communities_of_Practice__The_Organizational_Frontier%5B1%5D.pdf