Communities of Practice

Week 19

 Communities of Practice.

I will use the Jay and Johnson’s reflective model for my thoughts on this:

Descriptive-Comparative-Critical Reflection.

Descriptive:

My inquiry topics are two which could be interrelated down the line in the future. The first is one I have been working on in my school as my personal inquiry as I have a real interest with personalising learning and how digital tools can facilitate this.

I can also see me looking at how I can remove myself from the classroom! This is an interesting concept of how we can use digital tools from the flipped classroom, Youtube, and autonomous learning to self-organised, learning environments –“SOLE”  (Mitra, 2015), and using the Kaupapa Maori approach of Ako, (Pere, 1994) and Māhaki (Smith,2005), sharing knowledge as we learn from, and with, each other.

I have an already well formed Community of Practice (COP) for my first inquiry as we have a Teacher Led Innovation Fund (TLIF) group in place in our community involving our secondary school and a close neighbour, primary school. As Wenger (2000) describes the community having three dimensions of progress, “enterprise in showing leadership and pushing along its development and maintaining a spirit of inquiry” (p.230). We certainly have this as we have several threads of mutual inquiry into personalised learning happening, and we are seizing new opportunities to run with new ideas.  He also states the mutuality of the group and “how we must trust each other and feel comfortable addressing problems together and speaking truthfully” and “how self-conscious we are of the repertoire we are developing and its effect on our practice and its state of development from several perspectives” (p.230). This has certainly been established as we have grown together over two years of regular meeting and growing with our mutual learned understanding and interconnectedness across our schools.

With my second inquiry for the future COP, I can use my experience of the TLIF and develop the mutual interest of “the school in the cloud” (Mitra, 2018) and become part of this wider community to learn and expand my knowledge and develop how “self-organised learning environments” work and learning from people who are already in the field.

Comparative

My colleagues in the TLIF can talk from their perspectives of different subjects, different levels of abilities and even age as we spread across many year groups, being in both primary and secondary. They have engaged in different topics in their classrooms all involving digital tools in a way which will personalise the learning for the students. We at first had to define personalised learning in order to structure the inquiries to enable us to talk about what we have been trialling. This has allowed for real engagement across the year levels and to look at progression and take up of knowledge. We have used research and models of practice such as Tpack and SAMR and we have been lucky enough to engage with experts such as Rosemary Hipkins and Mark Osbourne who have worked with us as a group and helped us develop the next stage. We have grown with our sense of direction and kept in close contact about what we are doing and share our resources in a Google community. The strengths have been discussed with outcomes of measurable data and the failures we have looked at and trialled with a different age cohort or worked with a different subject group to gather data we can interpret to move on. We all have critical evaluations of our inquiries which we can share to form mutual areas of closer research or completely avoid!

Critical Reflection

Coming together as a group the critical reflections are easy to articulate when we have a history of growing through the years together. We know what each other are looking at with new apps or tools so we can ask the really truthful questions about what really worked and what didn’t. We can see the engagement of personalisation from many different angles with a group of teachers from all subjects and age ranges and we can be truthful, as Wenger says, as we are not together create a formal analysis. By talking honestly in a group we can ‘form a new and better understanding of our problems’ as Jay and Johnson says (2002, p.79). To find solutions to personalising the learning through many different tools will allow us to have a broad range of 21^st century tools in out kitbox.

References

Jay, J.K. and Johnson, K.L. (2002) Capturing complexity: a typology of reflective practice for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 73-85

Mitra, S. (2018), the school in the cloud; Retrieved from https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org/

Pere, R. R. (1994) Ako: Concepts and Learning in the Māori Tradition, Wellington: Kohanga Reo 

National Trust; Retrieved from http://www.rangahau.co.nz/rangahau/180/

Smith, L. (2005). On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty in, The Sage 

Handbook of Qualitative Research the Third Edition, Norman Denzin, Yvonna Lincoln (eds.), 

Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://www.rangahau.co.nz/rangahau/180/

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