Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice

Wenger, McDermott & Snyder (2002) define a community of practice as a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis.

Wenger (2000) defines communities of practices as meeting the three distinct elements: (1) joint enterprise - the shared domain which is the "collectively developed understanding of what the community is about", (2) mutual engagement - members engagement through interactions within the community and building mutual trust in the relationships, and (3) shared repertoire - the "communal resources" that the community produce.

'In order for a community of practice to thrive, the members have to ensure that they are collectively working on all three elements' (MindLab, 2018).

For the purpose of this reflection, my teaching colleagues will be my community of practice relating to the two inquiry topics: blended learning and agency and engagement. Our teaching staff have identified 3 strategic goals that we will be focusing on over the next 3 years, including growing student-centred learning, building identity through strengthening community and whanau partnerships, and growing teacher leadership capabilities - joint enterprise. We meet multiple times per week for teaching and learning purposes, admin, shift meetings, etc. we all have a critical friend that is there to support us as professional individuals, and I also have a mentor that I meet with weekly as I am a beginning teacher - mutual engagement. During our formal and informal meetings, we participate in reflection, discussion, feedback & feed forward, the sharing of experiences and expertise, etc. - shared repertoire. We believe in distributed leadership and therefore each staff member has an area of expertise that she is responsible for. Through our distributed leadership we collaborate and further develop our own abilities in multiple teaching areas.

Khan's Octagonal Framework of blended learning shows that learning requirements and preferences of each individual learner are often different and therefore schools must use a blended learning approach in order to get the right content in the right format to the right students at the right time. This means that when exploring strategies for effective learning we needed to consider a variety of issues to ensure effective delivery of learning and therefore a high return from our students (Singh, 2003). In order to achieve our goals of implementing digital technology into our classrooms, our school is now an active member of Manaiakalani. One of this organisations major focuses in on providing professional learning and development to support the wide community of educators, young people and whanau, in gaining full digital citizenship. We have 6 teaching staff and 1 principal at our school, and 3 of our staff are directly involved with Manaiakalani. They receive weekly PLD that they then share with the rest of the teaching staff. This has been beneficial to our community as we share, collaborate, and discuss the ideas and framework around blended learning, what it looks like in our classrooms, what we'd like to achieve, and what we'd like for our students. Being part of these conversations has helped me personally overcome doubts that I previously had about implementing technology into my programmes, as well as explicit teaching and learning for me to then transfer over to my students' teaching and learning.

Fredericks, Blumenfeld and Paris (2004) proposed a framework for considering engagement that distinguishes between cognitive, behavioural and emotional engagement. This shows there a varying levels of enagement among students and Shernoff (2013) says that this is because engagement depends on the relationship a student has with the experience of concentration, interest and enjoyment in the task at hand. Over the last few years, we have been focusing on shifting the level of engagement and student agency in writing as it has been a school-wide weakness, for a better word. Research indicates that meaningful engagement is composed of academic intesity and a positive emotional response which can be fostered through clear goals and high expectations (MindLab, 2018). In an attempt to improve not only the academic outcomes of our young writers, but the engagement and agency as well, we decided to link our blended learning to our writing. By implementing digital technologies into our writing programme, we were hoping to see a spike in engagement and academic success. Martin (2004) says agency is the capability of an individual to make choices and act on them in a way that makes a difference in their lives. Through our community we have been able to participate in discussions with other teaching professionals with the same goals. This has allowed me to seek advice and ideas from others with a lot more experience, but also receive feed back and feed forward on my own teaching practices.

Participating in this community of practice has been one of the most beneficial aspects of my professional development. I am able to explore new ways of bringing deliberate content to my students through the use of digital technologies that helps to engage my students on multiple levels and further develop their agency as learners.