My Community of Practice

I am currently teaching in a large primary school. I am leading a team of four Year 4 teachers working in a large, purpose-built ‘modern learning environment’. As well as being a classroom teacher and a team leader, I have responsibilities on the school’s curriculum development team. My interactions with various ‘groups’ on a daily basis are diverse, engaging and at times challenging.

As a registered teacher, I could describe myself as being part of a ‘global’ community of practice (Wenger, 2000) where we, as professionals with a shared interest in education, align our experiences and competencies to develop our collective understanding of good practice and community norms. Within the New Zealand context, our community’s competencies are described by the Practicing Teacher Criteria (Education Council, New Zealand) and the pedagogies referred to in the New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007). However, as participation and mutual engagement are essential aspects of a social learning system, I find it easier to define my community of practice within the boundaries of my school setting. Even when viewing the school as my community, I still consider there to be several sub-communities within it that I directly participate in – my team, the senior management team, the curriculum team. I describe these as sub-communities as I recognise that each of these groups has boundaries where, at points, there can be divergence of experience and competence (Wenger, 2000) within the larger community of the school.

When reflecting on my role within my team as a community of practice, I consider the progress we have made this year. I am new to the school, new to the role of team leader and also new to teaching collaboratively in a shared space. Initially, my lack of experience made me feel ‘incompetent’ and quite uncomfortable. Fortunately, my colleagues had been working in the environment for some time, and so were able to share their experience to support me in developing mine. On the other hand, there were some areas of need identified in specific curriculum areas that are areas of interest for me. A significant aspect of my role so far has been sharing current ideas on pedagogy to support the teachers in the team to develop their practice. We are developing ourselves as reflective practitioners and have included ‘Reflection’ as an agenda item in our team meetings to formalise this sharing of experiences, particularly with regards to ‘where to next?’. (As an aside, a huge benefit of collaborative teaching for me so far has been the amount of shared reflection we undertake continually – these conversations happen naturally and frequently and, more importantly, enable us to make changes quickly if necessary).

One of the key changes we have made as a team, based on my changed pedagogy and philosophy, has been moving to mixed-ability grouping for maths and writing, in order to promote equity in the classroom. (We plan to change reading eventually too, but are trying to keep the change manageable!). This has been an area of interest for me for some time, and maths was my focus area for teaching as inquiry last year. I have been able to share research, resources, examples of my own experiences (successes and failures!) and model elements of current views of best practice for my team. The team were open to new ideas and have been very positive in adopting change. As a team, we are seeing improved motivation and attitudes in the students as well as documented improvement in student achievement. Our changed maths programme is becoming a discussion point for other teams within the school and we have had several teachers coming in to observe our lessons. We have even had a teacher from another school observing. The feedback has been very positive and we all remain motivated and committed to the changes we have made.

I think the success of my team to date can be linked to Wenger’s definition of a successful social learning system. We are engaged by working together and sharing experiences, we are using our imaginations to explore the possibilities, and we are aligning our teaching philosophies so that our practice can be most effective.

References

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