Week 26: My Professional Community

For this week's reflection we are required to take a deeper look at our community of practice looking at organisational culture, changes that are occurring in our wider professional context and how we as a community are addressing them. The community that I will refer to here, is the school in which I work part time.

It was in fact the unique culture (heart) of school that attracted me to work there in the first place. For the past 5 years I have had some involvement with the school as an external PD facilitator. Although I worked across a wide range of schools, there was something about this school that stood out for me - and that was the ‘vibe’ that you had every time you entered through the gates. I could ‘feel’ a real sense of empowerment for the children - where everyone has something to offer. It was a place that fostered a strong sense of belonging and high aspirations. It was a place that had confidence in their students to experience success in the world - much like Mark Wilson’s TED talk around building a culture of success.

Exciting opportunities to learn were accessible to all students who entered through those gates - opportunities that were innovative and highly personalised through a Reggio-inspired philosophy of 8 Guiding Principles that were recently developed collectively by the team - best described by one of the school leaders here.

Now that I belong to this community, the unique school culture is even more evident and I can experience first hand the impact it has on the why, when and how learning takes place. It is now my responsibility to help contribute to our school culture by actively engaging with the Guiding Principles and using them to inform the decisions that I make in my teaching/facilitation. It is also my responsibility to help build that culture of success through the opportunities that I can provide for them. Drawing on my own expertise in the area of eLearning I can assist our community in utilising digital technologies in ways that align with and enhance our philosophy for learning. I can also utilise my professional learning networks to give our community global presence. For example - creating digital games for other kids around the world to play, publishing eBooks to iTunes, collaborative coding etc) - demonstrating to our students that anything is possible!

Our community of practice is responsive to the changes that are occurring in the Education profession. We recognise the impact that rapidly evolving digital technologies are having on society - and that the educational needs of our digital natives are very different to those of the generations that came before them. We have had to rethink the ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ we teach. Currently we are moving to a more collaborative approach to teaching and learning and looking at ways in which we can nurture greater student agency and learner independence through our Guiding Principles.

We are also looking at how we can effectively use digital technologies to transform teaching and learning - utilising Ruben Peuntedura’s SAMR model (with consideration of TPCK) to guide us. This also means improving our student’s access to technology with a move to a 1:1 programme. This year we have offered a BYOD (iPad) programme but recognise that cost of the device is a major barrier for many of our families. We are currently looking at funding options for tackling this challenge and ways in which we can provide opportunities for our parents to up-skill and experience the (transformational) benefits that digital technologies can offer our community of learners.