Community of Practice

Ok, so today is the beginning of the end of the road.  Now, I get to spend a bit of time each week sharing my final reflections of all the learning I've done and how it feeds right into my practice.

This week I'm identifying and talking about my 'Community of Practice'.  This means the group of people who share a special interest with me and we work together to increase our knowledge in that area.  Mine is obviously here at Corinna.  We're a community with a vision of, "Our learning community will be lifelong learners, empowered to use all the key competencies to shine in a range of contexts with- Voice, Agency, Identity."
So, pretty much, we're here to see how we can enable Corinna Kids to be successful in these areas.  We're constantly reminded of these ideas and speaking to them.

As I think through who my community is, I'm going to talk to 3 main parts of my community.  I'll use Wenger's definition to help me out.
He talks about domain, community and practice.

What is the joint-enterprise or the shared domain of interest that you identify with your community of practice?
Well, here it's anyone who sees the vision we see. That includes teachers, fulltime and part-time, teacher aides, students, and whanau or BoT that want to buy into the vision.

What are some examples of the activities or events that the members in your community of practice engage? How often do the activities or events take place?
Well, we chat everyday before school in the staffroom, we pull up our chairs to the coffee tables and chat at lunch. These informal chats are all about how our students are doing, what's going on for them. What happened yesterday, how we'll anticipate and deal with those things together. We also often share what we're attempting in our classes, and then excitedly share back our fails and successes when we re-catch up next break.
Also, we have some more formal across school events- level team meetings, whanau meetings, staff meetings, and across the community, we have CoL stuff. Also, we do professional development and social networks and all those kinds of things.

What kind of shared repertoire does your community of practice produce? (Experiences, stories, tools and ways of addressing recurring problems):
We produce lots of stories, laugh and general guidelines for how to approach different issues through our conversations each morning/break. We also adopt certain practices from our staff development and outside school input.


So, now that you've heard all the thrilling things about what my community is like, now I need to share who I am in this community of practice.🙈🙉🙊

What sense of connectedness or belonging do you have within your community of practice?
This is really variable. I often feel really connected and have a huge sense of joy, belonging, and purpose here in this place. At other times, I feel disconnected and out of place. It really comes down to how much I continue to walk in the vision and choose to be involved or not.

How would you describe your role within the community of practice? For example, a leader? A facilitator? An active member? A newcomer?
I'm a regular teacher in a class. I've been around for a number of years, but I'm definitely not the longest-serving person here, but I think I do lead sometimes (in my level team) and follow a lot of times too because I'm learning slowly on my own waka.

At what extent you are contributing towards your community of practice?
I bring food often to mindlab meetings!🍬🍫🍕 I do some of the time-consuming, but brainless jobs that keeps this place ticking-e.g. arranging, ooo, I just shiver with anticipation when I hear we're doing a tidy up/chuck out! Also, I'm a vocal member of discussions, often challenging or adding unhelpful, inappropriate jokes/comments!👻