Learning Communities
Learning Communities
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TQS: 2. Engaging in Career Long Learning. A teacher engages in career-long professional learning and ongoing critical reflection to improve teaching and learning. Achievement of this competency is demonstrated by indicators such as:
collaborating with other teachers to build personal and collective professional capacities and expertise;
actively seeking out feedback to enhance teaching practice;
building capacity to support student success in inclusive, welcoming, caring, respectful and safe learning environments;
seeking, critically reviewing and applying educational research to improve practice;
enhancing understanding of First Nations, Metis and Inuit worldviews, cultural beliefs, languages and values; and
maintaining an awareness of emerging technologies to enhance knowledge and inform practice.
As an organization, we believe in the importance of learning together. We see Engaging Through Learning Communities encompassing three elements:
Communities: school staff work in continuing groups "where they are committed to and have collective responsibility for a common educational purpose, where they are committed to improving their practice in relation to that purpose, and where they are committed to respecting and caring for each other's lives and dignity as professionals and as people" (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012).
Learning Communities: The work of learning communities is driven around improvement of student learning, achievement, and well-being with everyone in the organization contributing to long term solutions (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). We learn together by being engaged in a purposeful way around issues of instructional importance and effective principles of teaching and learning and continually ask ourselves three critical questions:
What do we expect students to learn?
How will we know if students have learned it?
What will we do if students have not learned it?
Professional Learning Communities: "Where collaborative improvements and decisions are informed by but not dependent on scientific and statistical evidence (data), where they are guided by experienced collective judgment (experience), and where they are pushed forward by grown-up challenging conversations about effective and ineffective practice" (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012, p. 128).
- Engaging through learning communities "is all about teachers and school leaders working together to develop effective instructional practices, studying what works well in classrooms, and doing so both with rigorous attention to detail and with a commitment to improving not only one's own practice but that of others" (Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010, p.74).
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