Activity 3: Contribution of Teacher Inquiry Topics to my Communities of Practice
Create a reflective entry where you critically reflect on how two potential and inspiring digital and/or collaborative learning related teacher inquiry topics would contribute to your Communities of Practice.
Teachers are collaborators, they love to share ideas, have discussions, catch up with others about their classroom practice. Every day teachers interact informally with members of their team, with other teachers at their school, and in an Innovative Learning Environment, the other teachers in their room. My sister is also a teacher in another part of New Zealand, and yet every week we reflect together on Facebook Messenger about what is happening in our classrooms.
More formally, I am a within school teacher for He Waka Eke Noa, a Community of Learning in Hamilton, this has entailed networking with teachers from the 12 schools in our COL. I am a participant at the Hamilton ConnectEd Cluster meetings, as well as at Educamp, the Tron, both are groups of like minded educators that meet to share ideas on eLearning. I am a student at The Mind Lab, a community of teachers participating in a postgraduate course with the Unitec Institute of Technology.
Wenger et al. (2002) describes a community of practice as a “group of individuals participating in communal activity, and experiencing/continuously creating their shared identity through engaging in and contributing to the practices of their communities”. In the video file, Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making Them Grow (Knox, B. 2009) we learn that Communities of Practice are all about the people, that they need to be valued, that they are organic and voluntary. For me, all of the examples listed above are Communities of Practice.
My two future teaching inquiry topics are going to revolve around 1: sharing the knowledge that I have gained this year (through MindLab and the COL) with the other teachers in my school, and 2: embedding more of this new knowledge in my own classroom practice.
I am hoping that my colleagues at school also find value in what I have learned and share my passion about eLearning and collaborative practice. I would like them to grow with me, to expand our knowledge and become an inschool Community of Practice.
In order for this to happen I am hoping that my involvement in He Waka Eke Noa will continue into 2018 and, of course, I will continue with my own knowledge quest with Mind Lab. I have found the networking involved in both these endeavours have been invaluable this year, and can see that social media will help to keep these ties active.
Knox, B. (2009, December 4).Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making Them Grow.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhMPRZnRFkk
Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.
