Identify your community of practice.
When identifying my community of practice it took me a while to look at what this was and who it involved. I was confused as to what this actually meant and had to look at a few readings to help me understand what this was/is. Wenger (2000), talks about how communities have excited for as along as the human race has been around. And that a community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who share the same goal or passion and they are always seeking ways in making this goal better by working together regularly.
For myself, I found that my main CoP was my team that I work with on a daily basis. I felt that my team was the main CoP as we have an Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) setup. Within this we have split our classes up and have mixed ability Literacy and numeracy groups. Because of the mixed ability groupings we have split our 5 classes across the 5 teachers and we all have different students from different classes. We regularly have informal discussions about how students and the programme is going and every week 3 and 8 of the term we get together to have a meeting about how our 'target' students are going. Because of the constant informal discussions with the team we are always refining our practice and making it better for our students. Within my team I am classed as an experienced teacher who has been with the team for 5 years now and have been in the ILE environment for 4 years. Although I have been in the ILE for 4 years each year has been different based on the students we get each year and the teachers we have in the team as well.
The second CoP I have just become a part of it our school leadership team. I have just become a team leader and have been learning how to be in a different role within the school. Because my role as a team leader is very new I feel that I have so much to learn and understand to help support my team, especially because this role means more than just a teacher. Becoming a team leader has made me look into my own teaching and leading abilities and I constantly reflect with my peer mentor about how I am doing and how I can do something better or differently. Something I am finding hard is being able to talk with someone about a matter, I find confronting people, especially about work matter hard and can sometimes come off abrupt or rude, but I am working on this and being able to find better ways with others. With the team leaders we meet every Tuesday morning to discuss matters relating to the school and then meet every week 3, 6 and 9, to work on how we can become better leaders for our team and the school. Just this week we looked at refining our school message and how this can be transparent for teachers, students and our whanau. We looked at how we could make the The New Zealand Curriculum / Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. (2017), explains that these key competencies help students become activity members of society.
Shared domain
Within my team CoP our shared domain is the teaching and learning of our students. We work together to create our planning with online interaction (shared planning), all our students are 'ours' and don't belong to one teacher. We aim to provide students with the skills to develop life long learning.
With in my team leader CoP our shared domain is the support and learning of not only or students but teachers as well. Being able to support and grow our teachers links to the support and growth of our students. As team leaders we set up peer mentors for ourselves and others with teachers across the school teams, for example senior teachers and intermediate teachers have been paired together.
References:
The New Zealand Curriculum / Kia ora - NZ Curriculum Online. (2017). Nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz. Retrieved 30 May 2017, from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum#collapsible7
Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.
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