Activity 1: My Practice Within the Community
When reflecting
on community of practice I realised as a teacher we have many, these often
overlap. I am going to mention four different communities of practice I am part
of.
My main
community at school would have to be in my classroom of year 7 and 8 students
we have the shared interest of learning together to follow ADMIRE (our school
values) and to achieve at level 4. As a class we set success criteria and
reflect on how lessons have gone. Setting goals and seeking feedback from peers
and well as myself as a teacher.
Students share learning on google docs and can add feedback online as
well. This also enables them to take their learning home and seek feedback from
their whanau. In this community I am a leader, a facilitator and an active
member. I am on a lifelong journey as a learner and think this is important to
model to my students. They share their expertise with me and others in the
class making them leaders at times as well. As I teacher I am constantly
upskilling myself to become a 21st Century educator and keep up with
the rapid changes. Undertaking
professional development such as the Mindlab course also models to my students’
my lifelong learning journey.
Another
community I am part of is being team leader for the Waingawa syndicate. My role
is to lead the team and feedback from senior management meetings. We meet twice
every seven day cycle. One meeting as a feedback from senior management and the
other to unpack curriculum areas. Within
our team we have members of the maths, inquiry and literacy team. Relationships and a sense of belonging are
key to everyone felling valued in the team. There are only four of us, so we
have time to share and learn from each other. Wegner (2000) discusses leadership
as having a “community coordinator” who takes care of the day to day tasks, I
see myself in that role, but then we distribute roles according to the passions
and knowledge of the members. Our community is growing in strength as the year
goes on as we were all new to the team this year.
As Literacy
Leader at school I also lead a team of five staff. As a team we are passionate
about literacy, sharing our ideas and taking back literacy knowledge to the
rest of the staff. Knox (2009) discusses
developing individual’s capabilities and as the leader of the literacy team I grow
the other members of the team to lead literacy within their syndicate. Later in
the term, the members will lead Practise Analysis Conversations throughout the
school. These will be learnt and practised within our community first, before
going school wide. The knowledge they learn will be distributed throughout the
school.
Lastly, for the
last twenty four weeks I have been part of a new community of practice, the
Mindlab Masterton July 2016 intake. We are a group of teachers from various
schools, who met weekly for the first sixteen weeks and now a small group from
our school still meet weekly. I see myself as an active member in this group.
We have a shared interest in improving our practice and meet to discuss and
share ideas. Online knowledge sharing and being part of the Facebook group, as
well as the Google+ community enables us to share online also.
References
Wenger, E.(2000).Communities of
practice and social learning systems.Organization,7(2), 225-246
Hi Amanda
ReplyDeleteI like the way you have stated that your class is your main community it has made me think that this could be a sub community for me. thanks for the idea