Activity Four - My Professional Community

Stakeholders of my professional community

Students are the key motivation for what I teach based on their learning needs. Parents play an important role in developing that through home/school relationships. Teachers, Management and the board are also communities I work with.

The concept of community of practice is influencing theory and practice in many domains. Wenger-trayner.com. (2015).

Students and parents can help develop theory and practice although they are not an influencing community. The stakeholders that would be my main community of practice would be teachers and my school. This is in different forms. My year group team (of 5) influence theory and practice. Through meetings and informal conversations we share current practice and observe one another to see current practice. Our school also has professional learning communities. These are directly related to accelerating learning for target students who are a bigger priority.

Technologies such as the Internet have extended the reach of our interactions. Wenger-trayner.com. (2015).

I am a member of various online communities. A Facebook group and the Mindlab community have helped me gain insight to current issues and extending my classroom practice through a wider range of ideas and resources.

Current issues and challenges in my community

A focus for my school community is modern learning environments (MLE). My school is trialling this in some classrooms. The trial is needed due to structure and teachers pedagogy. I believe that having an interest and understanding is important to success.  

The Ministry of Education states MLEs offer opportunities for collaboration and shared inquiries. Some classes have already adopted self-directed learning practices. This hasn't been filtered from management but individual teachers have taken ownership based on current research.  The disadvantage is some children in the school do not have the opportunity to be a child-directed environment and in some classes it is working more effectively than others. It is important we continue to share these practices especially amongst each year group. 
Osborne (2013) describes the features of MLEs:

• Flexibility
• Openness - traditionally fewer walls with a common learning hub.
• Access to resources - such as technology

 This definition offers challenges to our single cell classrooms. Some of our newer classrooms can open doors in order to share resources but they are still working as individual classrooms. The next step would be for teachers to collaborate and children to be able to free flow in a flexible environment. New Entrants will be used to this so the challenge is, are teachers able and prepared to teach like this? Another challenge would be the reaction of the parent community, some still don't understand flexible grouping. However, as management are keeping parents informed about practices and sharing research, this will help them to understand and join our journey.

Our building structure is not set up for what Osborne (2013) refers to as 'openness' with a common learning hub and breakout areas. However the ministry article provides research on transforming single cells into MLEs.  I have been adopting these practices by trying to create more space and the opportunity to self-direct and work collaboratively. Children have responded well but I have learnt that some of my younger boys have not been ready for self-direction and I have needed to alter my style to give them more support. Also I have learnt the need for clear expectations and routines in place. Not being confident in teaching writing, my flexible student directed programme wasn't successful and so I am still trialling ways to allow flexibility. Ideally in the future I would like to have more conferencing sessions that teacher directed learning intentions.

References not linked in the text

Wenger-trayner.com. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice | Wenger-Trayner. Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/