Community of practice

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

I have seen lots of this on this trip between the staff, between the students and between the staff and the students in both institutions.

" a community needs a common goal" was an opening gambit from Mike McCarthy, head of King Middle. There mission is clear and mantra like." We get everyone to the top of the hill, it is not enough to get yourself there"

It appears that EL have deliberately set up such a community of practice

Where a community of practice could be seen	Example	Expeditionary Learning model exampel
Problem solving	“Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck.”	Guiding Questions.
Requests for information	“Where can I find the code to connect to the server?”	The primacy of Self Discovery
Seeking experience	“Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?”	Work with Experts
Reusing assets	“I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client.”	Use of Models, prior student work
Coordination and synergy	“Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk discounts?”	Crew, small teams
Discussing developments	“What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?”	Student led conferences
Documentation projects	“We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all.”	Drafting culture
Visits	“Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city.”	Expeditions and experts. Public Exhibition
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps	“Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups should we connect with?”	Concepts are mapped

An interesting part of this all is the notion of legitimate peripheral participation, where by newbies begin on the periphery. They make no attempt to tackle the hard problems, but watch and help out with simpilar tasks. Their contributions are welcomed as they learn to become more sophisticated in their craft. 

A few  of simple examples spring to mind. 

1. Mixed ability ( what ever ability means) groupings.

2. The pair of the students that showed me around. One was a very articulate, very assertive student clearly academically gifted student, the other had started learning English after arriving as a refugee in 2011, who smiled widely but sometime struggled to explain his thoughts. So, while the first student explained eloquently the complexities of her  6 day schedule/ timetable and used phrases like " the HOWL's help us to develop our skills", he would say "Please come this way" and "I like this school" 

3. The grouping for the crew session that was ran by 2 students and groups of 11 adults, had a similar combination of the word rich and the word poor. 

4. Every group of students follow the same expedition
5. Student practicing and rehearsing a class presentation. Class focus on volume. SOme were confident and enunciated others, read quietly and looked down. But their was models of how it should be done. A classroom assistant even modelled the posture needed to present well, as each student took their turn.

Although the formal teaching of language is considered deeply at King Middle the informal day to day practice helps a great deal.