Week 3 - Blog Posting #6 - Communities of Practice

Communities of practice do occur everywhere, except in many of our classrooms. We design brand new classrooms with individual desks, set them up in rows, and occasionally allow the students to work in groups. Many teachers still believe that their job is to fill students with knowledge that will be given back on a test. Many administrators still praise teachers for having a “quiet classroom”.

How do we bring communities of practice into today’s classroom? I believe that we need to begin by building trust in our classrooms. Students are not very likely to share information or ideas when they are not comfortable with one another. Ideas must be accepted from everyone not just a select few.

We need allow students to set goals for themselves as a class and as individuals. Then we need to encourage them as they work toward the goals. We need to celebrate when the goals are met.

We need to share student’ learning data with them as a whole group and as individuals. They need to receive timely feedback when they turn in work and take tests. How do they use this information to set new goals?

We need to allow students time to collaborate with one another. Students with like interests should be encouraged to work together, to challenge one another and share what they learn with the community.

Teachers need to model a love of learning. We need to keep knowledge fresh. How can we be excited when we have taught the same activities for the last fifteen years? Knowledge is evolving and changing daily. We need to carry books and read them (in front of the students) so that they know reading and learning is important to us. We need to share what we learn with our students.

When I started this topic I thought of community as classroom and school. The Kettering Foundation’s researchers asked three groups of community organizers how their communities came to emphasize education over schools; what made people move from concern to complementary, broad-range public acting; and how concerned citizens learn from their work together. The foundation wanted to better understand the ways school-to-public engagement can be aligned to relate to the work of citizen-to-citizen engagement. Some questions to consider as you read:
How can a community come to recognize education as a shared, multifaceted challenge?
How can expanding the definition of educator help more community members see that they too are responsible for educating young people?
What story can you share of local work that illustrates that responsibility?
This article is available at: http://www.kettering.org/readers_forum/readers_forum/readers_forum_articles/ Communities_as_Educators

I am very impressed with the NSTA Communities available for NSTA members. Since this is available for members only I cannot post a link. I just became a Community member but have not taken time to fill out all of the questions. Other content areas would do well to copy NSTA's lead and provide this type of resource for members!