Community of Practice

What  is a community of practice?

Wenger (2000) says that a community of practice is not necessarily professionally focused, and is defined by joint enterprise, shared repertoire and mutual engagement.   For the purpose of this project, however, I need to acknowledge my professional colleagues because as Knox (2009) states that this is an important characteristic of the community I will need to support me.

Who are my communities of practice?

What is happening in terms of the inquiry topics I might focus on?

First and foremost, my mindlab colleagues, both within my school and local schools, are an important and supportive community for me. They have similar values around the importance of 21^st century skills and learning, which is one of the areas I would like to focus on. Along with Hawea Flat, Wanaka Primary and Cromwell Primary, we are all part of the New Pedagogies for Deep Learning (NPDL) cluster and are in different places on the journey to implementing this initiative in our schools. The leadership team at Goldfields, provides me with another layer to contribute to implementing 21^st century skills.  Two of them have been to an NPDL conference recently and we all have a shared vision around where to next for our school, teachers and learners. As a leadership team, my colleagues are passionate about providing our students with the skills they need for the future and we are excited to implement the strategies of NPDL into our planning and inquiry units. We have already used Kath Murdoch and her inquiry model to begin motivating staff and are looking at using her 10 key practices of an inquiry teacher and embedding these alongside the competencies from NPDL.

The second area of focus I am most interested in is in gamification in education. My Goldies mindlab colleagues are also interested in going further with this concept. During the gamification and game design session in our Mindlab journey, we were all captivated by the ways that gamification could be embedded into our classroom for our learners. Using online games for learning concepts, the students in our classes are on task, engaged and almost addicted to improving their performance. Immediately, we started thinking of ways that we could use this in other areas of our classroom programmes.

What does the research say?

Bolstad, Gilbert, McDowall, Bull, Boyd & Hipkins, (2012) identify one of the important themes in future-oriented learning is the use of current and emerging technologies. But they highlight the fact that as teachers, we need to start using these technologies to transform learning and that the only way to do that is when four strategies are in place,

“infrastructure, inspiration, capability and opportunities for innovation.”

Embedding gamification into classroom programmes would certainly contribute to implementing technologies in new and innovative ways and having a community of like- minded practitioners, giving feedback, celebrating success and challenging my thinking could only extend this for my learners.

Many of our colleagues are often hesitate to embark on new and innovative practices for their teaching. I believe that having research like the ITL Research (2012) identifying the skills needed for future learning, backing up the programmes I am trialling in my classroom, would mean that other teachers are more likely to see the relevance of using new teaching practices.

Where will my inquiry head next?

Hopefully, I manage to delve into these 2 topics as part of my next teacher inquiry – looking at increasing student motivation through gamification and prioritizing which 21^st century skills I will focus on.

I plan to continue sharing my inquiry through syndicate and staff meetings; giving my colleagues ideas to work on or trial in their own classrooms.  

Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching — a New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education. Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/schooling/109306

ITL Research. (2012). 21CLD Learning Activity Rubrics. Retrieved from https://education.microsoft.com/GetTrained/ITL-Research