Applied Practice in Context - Activity 1. My Community of Practice

Applied Practice in Context Week 25 Defining my practice

Activity 1. My Community of Practice

My Reflective Practice

I have always been a reflective person, and I think as teachers, reflecting upon our practice is something that is innate in us. We all go about it in different ways. I know that I sit and contemplate.

I tend to be quite hard on myself when a component in the lesson doesn’t go to plan, or perhaps even the tauira (learners) aren’t interested in what I thought they would be into learning about. I rehash the lesson plan and then I stop and think about what happened. I always look at myself first, before I think about what responses the tauira gave.

I always have the tauira at the forefront of my reflecting. Their learning, their engagement, their interactions and their well-being.

My Domain:

My domain is the absolute necessity for tauira to achieve to the best of their ability. To use an individual approach to nurture their well being and support through inequities (that collectively we can ‘control’) to learn on a level’ish playing field.

Community of Practice

A community of practice is defined by three distinct elements: joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire (Wenger, 2000).

I participate in two separate communities of practice. One being my current workplace, the other being an offsite PLG. Within my workplace, I will actively seek conversations with the tauira, their whanau, my Y8 colleagues, Y7 team colleagues, our team leaders, and the Senior Leadership team, as we are in a joint enterprise for improving educational outcomes for our tauira.

In my PLG we are four very experienced teachers. We do not work in the same schools, however we all have mutual engagement and until recently a shared repertoire (I have undertaken a new challenge to work with Y8’s, while the others are Junior School experts). We meet twice a term to discuss our reflective practice, our new learning, and we participate in open to learning conversations with each other. We share, challenge, inspire and inquire together.

Practice

I am new to my current workplace and am learning to marry the mix of my previous years of teaching experience with the practice at my new school. There is a well established way of how the school operates which is highly reflective and the SLT will make changes after extensive consultation. Expectations are high and we all have a shared understanding about what it means to work at the school.

My Community of Practice

We have a mutual learning community where I am learning from our tauira, my new team, they are learning from me and together we are collectively learning from and for our tauira. We are in the process of embedding Aspirations for Learning which underpin everything we do at our school. These aspirations incorporate our values and our school expectations for learning. We all want the absolute best for our tauira.

My classroom - and beyond

My aim is to instill an Optimal Learning Zone, wherever we are learning. Key concepts as decided by the tauira and I include...We are a whanau, we work together, we support each other, we belong, we learn from each other, we share freely, we take what we need and leave enough for others, we are each other’s moral compass, we pull each other up, we celebrate failures (First Attempts In Learning) and successes, we celebrate being different, we guide, we take risks, we talk, we collaborate, we reflect on our own and together, we are respectful, we are responsible, we are ready to learn and we bounce back when challenged. We have a collective kaupapa in our learning space and our goal is to transfer this to any learning space we are in. Each and every day.

My role in our community of practice is to be a leader, a learner, a guide, a modeller, a fail’er, a talker, a listener, an adviser, a negotiator and to instill these learning aspirations in our whanau of learners.

Individually, we are not the holders of all the knowledge. What we bring to the learning environment is valued and what we take away we are expected to use to make a change in our learning practice.

Why would we invest so much of ourselves, not to make the most of every opportunity to learn?

What do you think?

Any advice and guidance from this newcomer to teaching Y8’s will be gratefully received.  

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