Communities of practice

Contribution of Teacher Inquiry Topics to my Communities of Practice

It is human nature to seek another for clarification or help but we may not seek out professional groups rather a trusted source. Wenger (2000) describes how a community of practice can be defined by three elements: joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire. I probably use my spiritual community as a community of practice as it fulfils the three modes of belonging.


I understand my own inhibitions of only being in my third year of teaching and still inexperienced, I tend to listen more than contribute as I value those who have had much more experience as well as only not being brought up in N.Z. Naturally I draw upon specific diverse groups of people for advice and ideas especially from those who have expertise in that area. For example, teaching related questions would always be directed to my colleagues at school, discussions for ideas for what has worked within classrooms are with my peers from university (as they too are relatively inexperienced), spiritual matters are referred to my spiritual teacher and family or personal matters are discussed with my family and friends. Knox (2009) describes a how a community of practice can be successful, I believe I have had the benefit of experiencing this within a spiritual learning context. I hope to be able to apply the ideas he mentions in a school education context as each person contributes to the greater project in a manner that suits them resulting in successful events based on topics of interest from the cohesive efforts of the individuals who make up the community of practice. 


  
Thinking about my school and community, I know we are setting up a Community of Learning to hopefully form cohesive transitions and transparency across education in Hāwera. Yet, there is still lots of room to develop communities of practice. There are many different ways we can build our communities of practice, I know our particular Mindlab group has created a Facebook page but is yet to be fully utilised. Below is a picture that presents how we can use tech to help build your community of practice.



I didn’t always take the benefit of collaboration seriously, as I am absolutely fine working independently. Yet, from the Digital and Collaborative unit with the Mindlab the power of collaboration soon became clear. Interactions during our Mindlab sessions prioritised those discussions and you knew that would be the time to discuss any ideas. Now with hindsight I value the time we spent even more as I struggle to regularly contact others to discuss ideas and concepts currently with the Mindlab. A clear way to move forward would be to set a regular time to go through our learning (creating a mini community of practice within our school) so that we can initially work towards our Mindlab assignments and then continue once it has been established.


My potential inquiry topics are mainly math based as that has been my focus over the past two years. The MST community of practice is already established with opportunities to meet throughout the year as a cohort and as a local group. I would be able to use this community as well those who are involved in Mindlab to widen my community of practice. One of the main barriers in students learning in Mathematics is anxiety, this is has been a large focus through my MST learning. Therefore, the first topic I have chosen is: How can gamification reduce Math anxiety. The second topic: How can I use blended learning initially in my Maths programme, then adapt to other curriculum areas? As I have noticed that students enjoy a mixture of teaching styles and mediums, so how could I incorporate that into my practice.


:)


References:

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


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

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