Coaching

"If we create a culture where every teacher believes they need to improve, not because they aren't good enough, but because they can be even better, there is no limit to what we can achieve."  ~ Dylan William, education researcher

Communities of Practice (CoP) definition

Professional Development in Early Childhood Programs: Process Issues and Research Needs, 2009

Communities of practice

Training and coaching represent relatively short-term and small-scale learning encounters. Communities of Practice are a form of ongoing professional development that is becoming more widely known in the field of early childhood education and intervention (Helm, 2007; Wesley & Buysse, 2006). Communities of Practice (CoP) are defined as groups of individuals who come together on the basis of a common professional interest and a desire to improve their practice in a particular area by sharing their knowledge, insights, and observations (Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). Lave and Wenger (1991) first used the term to describe the situated learning that takes place in apprenticeship, a learning model that involves a complex set of social relationships by which experts pass on knowledge to novices. The concept overlaps with related terms used in education where the experts are teachers themselves learning from one another as they study their students’ work and lesson plans. This approach to improving teacher practice is closely related to teacher action research in early childhood (Stremmel, 2008; Yorks, 2005) and described under such diverse labels as descriptive review of student work (Himley & Carini, 2000), lesson study (Lewis, 2002), co-inquiry (Abramson, 2008), collaborative analysis of student work (Langer, Colton, & Goff, 2003), and documentation study (Peaslee, Snyder, & Casey, 2007; Project Zero and Reggio Children, 2003).

Communities of practice have been used to support professional development in a variety of settings, including schools and child care programs (Bray, Lee, Smith, & Yorks, 2000). The groups can include organization-specific members or a mixture of agency-employed teachers and external facilitators. CoP meetings require an expert facilitator who is someone with relevant experience and practical wisdom and can help the group ask questions, connect and build ideas, expand key points, provide history and useful resources, and stay on task (Kennedy, 2004). As such, the relationships can be characterized as bi-directional, with information transferring from facilitator to participant and back. In CoP meetings, which take place face-to-face or electronically in a virtual community, participants focus on issues, problems, and successes that emerge from authentic situations in their work. This allows for the experience to be highly relevant and applicable for participants. Many groups use a formal protocol for guiding participants in offering reactions, raising questions, and brainstorming next steps. The participants can create and reflect on specific plans and feedback for their own work settings. The goal of these communities is to reduce the research-to-practice gap as well as create self-sustaining networks of stakeholders focused on translating, applying, and in some cases, producing new evidence in early education by integrating research findings from scientists with experiential knowledge from practitioners.