BLOG POST 1- Louise MacKay

WEEK 26

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

 It had never occurred to me before that my Community of Practice (COP) is embedded into many different aspects of my professional life.

Wegner and Treyner (2015) acknowledge that this is a relatively new title to give to an age old phenomenon and define a community of practice as being “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” 

I have reflected on who makes up my COP. I am aware that I am a member of a number of different COP at different levels.  These include my school community including my team ( hub) and the staff as a whole, my preschool teachers network group, the mind lab family, my professional learning group to name but a few. I am involved at different levels and I might add, at different times, with these COP, however there are two groups that I consider to be my “main” COP for the time being and for the purpose of this post, I will concentrate on my teaching team and my preschool networking group. My teaching team consist of 5 teachers, in my Hub at my school.  My preschool networking group is a group of about 20 teachers from different preschools in our area and the teachers in my hub at our school. I set up this group to share ideas, and develop relationships with the preschools in our area to help make the transition to school smoother for the children. 

 Wenger (2015) identifies three main characteristics that must be present to form a COP.  These are the domain, the community and the practice. The domain is the area of shared inquiry of the key issues, the community is about relationships among the members and their sense of belonging and the practice is about the knowledge, methodology, the documents and the resources.  (Knox 2009)

The shared domain with my teaching team at school is the children we teach and ensuring that they receive the best education possible and that their individual needs are being met in a nurturing and caring environment.   Our community is fostered by coming together regularly as a hub and as a team to pray and sing together, we share our successes as a hub by meeting for a weekly hui and we meet several times a week to learn together.  In my teaching team, we work together to learn from each other and to collectively work out how to meet our goals so that we value other people’s knowledge, expertise and opinions and allows for us to expand and exchange this knowledge.  This happens in several different ways.  We have weekly meetings to share ideas and plan collaboratively, we have individual as well as group professional discussions.   Currently we are working collectively on our values and our school vision as we are a newly opened school so this has been valuable in developing the COP ensuring that it is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community. (Wegner 2000)

In my preschool networking group, we have a shared domain of helping each other to ensure the children have a smooth transition from the early childhood setting to school. I am the leader of this group so I feel responsibility to ensure we are meeting on a regular basis to share ideas and expertise and build up a collective bank of resources.  Every member of the group is continuing to build relationships with each other and share knowledge to better themselves as teachers and ultimately to ensure the transition to school for these wee people is as smooth as it can be.

The members of both my COP understand the shared purpose of belonging to the community and are committed to regular interactions.  This has lead us to build up resources and knowledge and we all have someone to turn to if we need advice with anything.  I think our communities are something we need to continuously develop and nurture.

REFERENCES

Knox, B. (2009, December 4).Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making Them Grow.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhMPRZnRFkk

Wenger-Traynor, E & B. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice. http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press