Reflecting on my Practice within the Community
Wenger (2000) states "Communities of practise are the basic building blocks of a social system...we define with each other what constitutes competence in a given context."
(p. 229) My immediate community of practice are my teaching colleagues within Mamaku Hub, the staff of Grey Main School, including the Leadership Team of which I am a part of, the Mawhera Community of Learning (CoL), Our Toki Pounamu Digital Cluster and my Fellow colleagues who are understaking Mindlab alongside me.
Over the last few years we have strategically begun to develop collaborative learning practises and learning spaces to enable our students to have greater student agency.
The collaborative teaching and learning environments that had been the focus still needed to be further developed school wide to reduce the barriers that were inhibiting some of our targeted students from making progress.
Within my community of practice we identified inconsistencies with collaboration within teams and across teams. This was made very clear during our initial across cluster moderations of AsTTle writing samples. In the initial stages, the mode of belonging was centered around student engagement. Creating change has been difficult at times but in order for change to occur, there was a need for pedagogical practices to be refined and a shared understanding developed by teachers. Sharing of practice and successes has been encouraged. Student voice, observations, professional development, particularly in the areas of writing and collaboration, and current research gave us the direction for change. All members within my community of practice have been involved in some way in the change process and there has been a strong commitment to raising student achievement and engagement. As part of our on-going commitment to change senior management sought support through targeted PLD and all staff have undertaken a considerable amount of PLD over the past couple of years.
As a Year 5/6 team leader within my school I would like to believe that I model collaboration. I believe I do this through planning, interactions with my staff and students and also my wider school community. This has allowed for new staff members in my hub to participate in collaborative learning practices and this has been very empowering on a variety of levels.
Within in my community of practice my role has been to help facilitate change. I feel that I have mainly operated within the transformational leadership role, a "motivator, communicator and Facilitator of Communication" Govindarajan and Trimble (2010). I continuously move in and out of roles pending on where the need arises. All staff have undertaken Professional development in the areas 21st century learning, digital development and unpacking the NZ curriculum PACT tools. We also all undertook weekly PLD around Mindfulness and creating a positive growth mindset. As a Col we have shared targets around boys writing. There is West Coast wide PLD with Toki Pounamu Toolkits. As the leader of sports activities within my school and also district and Coast wide a great deal of collaboration (school wide, community wide, coast wide) goes into planning and delivery of events.
We need to ensure that our Community of Practice remains focused. A dedicated undertaking of teacher inquiry, CoL targets and National Standards assessment will continue to be linked to create effective collaboration in our teaching and learning environments. As a cluster we have collaborative teams and we must ensure that as staffing changes happen we work hard to ensure that these practices continue. We must continually reflect and develop.
My next personal focus is the continued collaboration and engagement with our school family and whanau. This has developed successfully over the past 2 years with the introduction of our Whanau meetings which are particularly for our Bilingual family, however everyone is welcomed along. This idea is something I would like to somehow develop within my Hub. A great was to collaborate and celebrate students learning regularly.
References:
http://www.psycholosphere.com/Communities%20of%20Practice%20&%20Social%20Learning%20Systems%20by%20Wenger%202000.pdf
(p. 229) My immediate community of practice are my teaching colleagues within Mamaku Hub, the staff of Grey Main School, including the Leadership Team of which I am a part of, the Mawhera Community of Learning (CoL), Our Toki Pounamu Digital Cluster and my Fellow colleagues who are understaking Mindlab alongside me.
Over the last few years we have strategically begun to develop collaborative learning practises and learning spaces to enable our students to have greater student agency.
The collaborative teaching and learning environments that had been the focus still needed to be further developed school wide to reduce the barriers that were inhibiting some of our targeted students from making progress.
Within my community of practice we identified inconsistencies with collaboration within teams and across teams. This was made very clear during our initial across cluster moderations of AsTTle writing samples. In the initial stages, the mode of belonging was centered around student engagement. Creating change has been difficult at times but in order for change to occur, there was a need for pedagogical practices to be refined and a shared understanding developed by teachers. Sharing of practice and successes has been encouraged. Student voice, observations, professional development, particularly in the areas of writing and collaboration, and current research gave us the direction for change. All members within my community of practice have been involved in some way in the change process and there has been a strong commitment to raising student achievement and engagement. As part of our on-going commitment to change senior management sought support through targeted PLD and all staff have undertaken a considerable amount of PLD over the past couple of years.
As a Year 5/6 team leader within my school I would like to believe that I model collaboration. I believe I do this through planning, interactions with my staff and students and also my wider school community. This has allowed for new staff members in my hub to participate in collaborative learning practices and this has been very empowering on a variety of levels.
Within in my community of practice my role has been to help facilitate change. I feel that I have mainly operated within the transformational leadership role, a "motivator, communicator and Facilitator of Communication" Govindarajan and Trimble (2010). I continuously move in and out of roles pending on where the need arises. All staff have undertaken Professional development in the areas 21st century learning, digital development and unpacking the NZ curriculum PACT tools. We also all undertook weekly PLD around Mindfulness and creating a positive growth mindset. As a Col we have shared targets around boys writing. There is West Coast wide PLD with Toki Pounamu Toolkits. As the leader of sports activities within my school and also district and Coast wide a great deal of collaboration (school wide, community wide, coast wide) goes into planning and delivery of events.
We need to ensure that our Community of Practice remains focused. A dedicated undertaking of teacher inquiry, CoL targets and National Standards assessment will continue to be linked to create effective collaboration in our teaching and learning environments. As a cluster we have collaborative teams and we must ensure that as staffing changes happen we work hard to ensure that these practices continue. We must continually reflect and develop.
My next personal focus is the continued collaboration and engagement with our school family and whanau. This has developed successfully over the past 2 years with the introduction of our Whanau meetings which are particularly for our Bilingual family, however everyone is welcomed along. This idea is something I would like to somehow develop within my Hub. A great was to collaborate and celebrate students learning regularly.
References:
Govindarajan, V., & Trimble, C. (2010). The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press
Wenger,E. (2000). Communities of Practice and Social Learning System. Retrieved from:http://www.psycholosphere.com/Communities%20of%20Practice%20&%20Social%20Learning%20Systems%20by%20Wenger%202000.pdf
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