Communities of Practice ( COP)

I suppose we are all in some type of community of practice and until I started with the Mind Lab I had little understanding of them even thou I have spent all my life in one.

How would I go about setting up a community of Practice in my school?

Here is our idea to implement an innovative classroom that would change the way classrooms are set up and the way teachers teach.

Over the past six to seven years, I have worked closely with the teacher next door. Our teaching styles are different but our pedagogies are very similar so the change wouldn't be that hard. 

We both wanted the same end result, a classroom that was exciting for students to learn in and manageable workloads for teachers. Over the next four years, we discussed the commonalities we had in our teaching. Timetables and classroom management styles etc.... Finally, we came up with a plan that if we merged the classes from two groups into one and co taught the class. The student would get the best from each of us and our workloads would be reduced (somewhat reduced). We trialled the idea for six months and we have looked back in three year.

So looking back at the community of practice and E. Wenger say these are the things you need to make a community of practice

Domain - joint enterprise

Community – mutual engagement

Practice – share repertoire  

We also use a variety of these learning models – Behaviourist , Constructivist ,  Social learning,  as they are hard to get rid of but we do incorporate the ideas of Vygotsky, Bandura and Maslow as part of our classroom management.

So my next step is to introduce the community of practice to our target group by setting up our classroom to promote our ideas of making innovative learning environment student orientated and user friendly for all ( teacher included),  to show our colleagues workloads can be reduced when you co-teach.

The skills we needed in our, two teacher,  community of practice were learning to Improvise, Strategize and be Problem solvers within our small COP.

And this what we’ll show others - help when possible/needed and to be inventive by having lots of ideas that can help our colleagues succeed this

References

Knox, B.(2009, December 4). Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making Them Grow.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhMPRZnRFkk

Sweeney, R. (2015). Building collaborative Teaching as Inquiry teams using spiral of Inquiry. Retrieved from http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2015/06/building-collaborative-teaching-as-inquiry-teams-using-spirals-of-inquiry.html

Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Overview of Social Learning Theory   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28IW_Odp_g

Social learning a framework https://youtu.be/qvighN3BDmI