Creating a Community of Practice for and with my Students
My research over the past couple of years has been around developing Communities of Practice for teacher professional learning. It's all about making learning connected and relevant for individual teachers and getting rid of the 'one-size-fits-all' professional learning and the 1 or 2 day courses which do very little to encourage sustained change in practice in our profession.
The more I've researched this, the more relevant I've seen it to be for our students. I started to implement some changes and some of the ideas before I left my previous school and the impact, in a very short time, was quite a surprise.
Communities of Practice are about sharing, curating and creating new learning. Everyone in the community learns from each other no matter what their level of experience. We started out with Google Apps as our platform. Skills were taught and shared and the ideas behind the CoPs were explained to the students who had many questions and ideas for adaptation which I was very excited about and which made so much sense. I learn from and with my students and this was a real case in point for me.
The presentation below details part of the journey I've been on. I'm at the stage of writing up the first phase of the research which is the final part of my Masters. My intention is that I will apply the knowledge gained from this research to my teaching practice and my classroom to develop a Community of Practice that is a successful learning tool for my students and myself. We will continue to use Google Apps for Education as our platform so there's a lot more learning around that for me too. My expectation is that my students and I will develop this community together as a way to strengthen and grow our learning.
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