Domain
This community of practice is the junior syndicate at my school. I lead the team of 5 teachers and 2 teacher aides and we work closely together in proximity. The reason for this community of practice is to align our experiences with the competencies each of us defines as being 'best practice' and to constantly reflect on the effectiveness of these practices. The shared domain is the achievement and well-being of our students.
Community
We meet on both a regular formal and informal basis. We work as a team by sharing teaching and learning spaces and children. We help each other and share information using digital technology and keep each other well informed by sharing programmes and planning via google docs, google sites, email, as well as face to face encounters.
Practice
We carry out our work in ways that have been agreed and with a shared repertoire of resources. We share experiences and stories and reflect and modify our practice based on these. This creates a lot of enthusiasm and energy. Success is on the 'energy' that the community generates (Wenger-Trayner, 2015).
All this generates a sense of belonging and 'connectiveness' in my role as syndicate leader.
The extent of my contribution involves setting the meeting agendas, modelling and fostering positive energy and vibes - with changes in staff the latter can be hard work!
Some thoughts as I reflect on the readings this week:
- Reflective practice is problem solving - a 21st century skills we are endeavouring to promote in our classrooms.
- Reflection 'in' action - is about using initiative and having the confidence to use it.
- 'Critical' reflection can have connotations as being negative - I liken this to a 'critical friend' peer observation programme I once participated in as the name always seemed a bit daunting and negative but changed to a much more positive experience when we called it 'peer support' observations.
We are all constantly striving for self-improvement and improvement as a community of practice - Reflecting on what this actually looks like has been helpful - especially when considering that it should not overwhelm actual practice.
Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file…
Finlay, L. (2009). Reflecting on reflective practice. PBPL. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/opencetl/files/opencetl/file…
Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.
Wenger, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Communities of Practice a brief introduction. Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/07-Brief-introduction-to-communities-of-practice.pdf
I like the links you have made to 21st century skills. We do need to be modelling these skills to our students, and what better way to do it than in our everyday work.
ReplyDeleteI relate to your comment about changing staff. All schools and groups within schools, such as syndicates, are naturally changing. It can be difficult reach those strong relationships when the group seems to always be in the 'forming' stage.
Hi Sharon, thanks for your comments. We try to conduct our teaching practice as an image of what we expect our students to do in lots of ways at our school. One example is recently we have used the same blogging platform for our appraisal reflections as our classroom blogs. This is having the added benefit of teachers becoming more confident in using blogger and many of it's gadgets with their children as they are developing skills by blogging professionally. We have labels set up for all the practicing criteria so we can easily keep track of the ones we have posted evidence for - now teachers are using labels to link the children's work to their names so families can easily see just their child's work on the class blog.
DeleteI enjoyed reading about your community of practice Jan. The relationship you form and share with your syndicate /colleagues (even with staff changes) has the foundation to be built upon and can only get stronger. I like the collaboration, sharing and support you and your team provide one another.
ReplyDeleteThanks Ngawahine, I agree that developing strong and trusting relationships with each other is a powerful way to achieve success and growth in our school. Once again - modelling collaboration and practicing it together as a staff sets an example to our students of what we expect them to do to develop 21st century learning skills. As we build trust in our team we are far more effective in getting alongside and into each others classrooms to provide support and guidance to each other to ever reflect on being better teachers.
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