Week 25 Reflective Post: Communities of Practice

Activity 1: My practice within the community
I have a fairly small physical community of practice and find that information shared within my colleague group at my current school is anecdotal for the majority of time. We have a small staff and we are fairly informal with each other and speak freely - the good, the bad and the ugly are often shared around our staffroom table. However, in terms of online communities, there are vast depths of knowledge available to us through using the primary teachers facebook page. This is a place where we share ideas, projects, successes, ask questions, gauge a situation we might be having, support each other even though we're strangers and get several thousands of other view points.
Wegner (2000) speaks about there being three different elements and these can be clearly seen across my teaching communities:
Joint enterprise - the sharing and developing an understanding of what the community needs within the context of the school environment, with staff who might have taught that student that you're reflecting on!
Mutual engagement - the discussion of ideas, challenges and successes around the staffroom table, or the sharing of posts online and encouraging words in comment sections. Connections are reciprocal - particularly online, where you might get a variety of different ideas from the pool of knowledge.
Shared repertoire - the collaboration between the people online and face to face to share ideas and resources e.g. borrowing a book from a colleague to help a child with anger issues because they used it with them last year, sharing digital resources or links to cool sites/apps online for the whole teachers facebook page to use, discussing ideas and building up a bank of resources for the whole school to use.
However, in terms of my practice within these communities, at my current workplace, I have been growing in my connectedness there as I was new to the staff in January 2017 and have been teaching 4 years compared to those who have been considerably longer! I have a good foundation there this year and am becoming more and more active and backing my own abilities and ideas. I find sharing ideas and responding online easier as I am one voice of many and can share my opinion alongside many others!

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