#CyberPD WrapUp - Growing Our Thinking Together

Like Johnston, Gail Tompkins advocates for the creation of a community of learners in the classroom. In Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach Tompkins (2009, p. 17) describes the characteristics of a community of learners environment:

Responsibility - Teachers set guidelines and expect students to be responsible. They also model responsible behavior. Students assume responsibility for their learning and behavior in the classroom.

Opportunities -Teachers provide opportunities for students to read and write in genuine and meaningful activities. Students actively participate in activities, for example, reading independently and sharing their writing with classmates.

Engagement - Teachers nurture students’ engagement through authentic activities and opportunities to work with classmates. Students become more engaged in literacy activities and spend more time reading and writing.

Demonstration - Teachers model what good readers and writers do using think-alouds to explain their thinking. Students carefully observe teachers’ demonstrations and then practice by modeling their thinking for classmates.

Risk Taking - Teachers encourage students to take risks while exploring a new idea and de-emphasize the need to always get things “right.” Students understand that learning is a process of taking risks and exploring ideas.

Instruction -Teachers provide explicit instruction through mini-lessons and provide opportunities for guided practice. Students participate in mini-lessons and apply what they’re learning in literacy activities.

Response - Teachers provide opportunities for students to respond to books they’re reading and to classmates’ writing. Students respond to books in reading logs and grand conversations and listen attentively to classmates share their writing.

Choice - Teachers offer choices because they understand that students are more motivated when they can make choices. Students make choices about some books they read, projects they create, and compositions they write.

Time - Teachers organize the schedule with large chunks of time for reading and writing. Students understand the classroom schedule and complete assignments when they’re due.

Assessment -Teachers monitor students’ learning and set guidelines about how students will be graded. Students understand how they will be assessed and often participate in self-assessment.

For the past year, I've had the honor of visiting two third-grade classrooms with two teachers who worked hard to create a community of learners with their students and I want to share a story of the students' view of this type of classroom.

To help students practice listening to each other and speak to and build off of each other's ideas, the teachers provided sentence starters to help the students develop the language of connecting ideas. The rules of engagement for this particular discussion was that everyone had to speak once before anyone could speak a second time and that the comment had to connect to another student's comment (agree, disagree, add to etc). After this especially intense discussion that included both third grade classes, the teachers asked the students to think about the process and reasons for having discussions. As scribes, the teachers captured the thinking of the students on a chart. The students said:

Growing Our Thinking Together

• Our thinking grows like a balloon with each comment from a friend
• It gives us confidence
• We capture other people's thinking
• We build on what others say, like knots in a rope (they had studied Quipus (talking knots) of Peru)
• We cooperate, listen and ask for clarification
• We restate our ideas
• Everyone contributes
• We yield to each other
  • Let less talkative people go first
  • Person with relevant information goes first (valuable)
  • Let the person who is responding to another go first

This metaphor, of growing our thinking together like a balloon, carried over for the rest of the year. If a student derailed a conversation, it was called “popping the balloon.” It was so powerful to hear the students recognize the power their own language had on others.

Like many others have said, I will need to re-read Opening Minds to really let the ideas simmer. It is my goal this school year to create a community of learners in my classroom where I learn along with my students and honor the contributions they provide.

If you would like to join the conversation about Peter Johnston's book Opening Minds:Using Language to Change Lives, check out #CyberPD on Twitter, or this week's host, Carol, at Carol's Corner.

Affinity Space

Gee builds on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of communities of practice, but focuses more on the space, rather than membership. He proposes that the assumption of community is a false one, as people can participate in the same community, yet not feel a sense of belonging or membership. Gee defines affinity spaces as a “place, or set of places where people can affiliate with others, based primarily on shared activities, interests, and goals” (2004, p.73). With online communication becoming more prevalent, Gee believes that this re-conceptualization of communities of practice is needed because “if we start by talking about spaces rather than “communities” we can then go on and ask to what extent the people interacting within a space, or some subgroup of them, do or do not actually form community” (2004, p. 78). Using the term “community” indicates closer social ties, that of belongingness and membership with similar goals, which aren't always present in online communication. It may be easier to delineate the boundaries of the space and then look at how different sorts of people use that space - what they do there and what they get from that space.

To define the space, especially online where there are no physical or geographical boundaries, Gee (2004) suggests content and interaction as a way of defining the space. The things that give the space content and meaning, he titles the generator. The entry into the space he titles the portal which isn't another person, but rather a tool (textbook), activity (small group discussion), or generation of content (posting a lesson plan). For an affinity space, people choose to enter the space because of an interest in the content, not the people occupying the space, which is a significant shift from Lave and Wenger’s (1991) community of practice where the apprenticeship model and relationships are key. In an affinity space, there is little designation of apprentice or master. Gee’s (2004) defining characteristics of an affinity space include:

1. A common endeavor (interests, goals or practices)
2. People with varying levels of experience and skill share the same space
3. Ways of entering the space can also generate content
4. Content is organized and transformed by the users
5. Intensive and extensive knowledge is encouraged
6. Individual and distributed knowledge is encouraged
7. Dispersed knowledge (not in the space) is highlighted
8. Tacit knowledge is modeled and articulated
9. Many forms and routes to participation
10. Many routes to status
11. Leadership is porous and leaders are resources

Much of Gee's work, and others, focus on affinity spaces online and mostly through massive multi-player online role playing games or fan-fiction sites (Gee, 2003; Squire & Steinkuehler, 2005; Squire, Giovanetto, Devane, & Durga, 2005; Black, 2007 ). However, the characteristics Gee describes are evident in many other online spaces, such as a collaborative wiki or Ning.

References

Black, R.W. (2007). Fanfiction writing and the construction of space. E-Learning, 4(4), 384–397. Retrieved from dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2007.4.4.384

Gee, J.P. (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. New York: Routledge.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Squire, K., Giovanetto, L., Devane, B., & Durga, S. (2005). From users to designers: building a self-organizing game-based learning environment. TechTrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning, 49(5), 34-74.

Squire, K., & Steinkuehler, C. (2005). Meet the gamers. Library Journal 130(7), 38–42

Communities of Practice

Communities of practice, as a concept has been around since the beginning of civilization when humans gathered together to support each other's survival. The more experiences members of the community would mentor and model the needed skills and ways of thinking to the less experienced members through storytelling, direct instruction and observation of practice. However, the term “communities of practice” (CoP) was coined as a research term by anthropologists Lave and Wegner (1991) to understand how apprenticeships help people learn. Through their study of multiple apprenticeship models in various careers, they recognized that the learning was situated, in other word, it was located within the practice and participation of the activities of the job. As novices, the apprentice was mentored into the community through a process of legitimate peripheral participation. Accordingly, the novices were given low-risk tasks, observed the masters, and in some cases, encourage to discuss the work. This legitimate peripheral participant advances the goals of the community while at the same time, provided the novices hands-on training in the work. The more directly involved with the work of the masters, the more deeply the novice is able to understand the activities and ways of thinking. As the novices gain experience, their own work moves toward the central activities of the community and they, in turn, become mentors to other novices. 

 

In brief, Wenger defines communities of practice as “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” (Communities of Practice: An Introduction, 2006). There are three characteristics which define them: domain, community and practice. The domain is what distinguishes the group from just a network of people. Membership in the community is based on a commitment to the shared interest or concern. However, the only way to form community is through interaction – the sharing of information, activities, discussions, help and support. The interaction does not need to be face-to-face, asynchronous or daily; but consistent and dependable. Although the community is formed around a shared interest or concern, it is more than just a fan club. As McDermott observes, “communities of practice are not just celebrations of common interests. They focus on practical aspects of a practice, everyday problems, new tools, developments in the field, things that work and don't” (10 Critical Success Factors, 2000). The members of the community are practitioners of the activity – whether that activity is nursing, snow boarding, or engineering. The members, individual, engage in similar practice and therefore have common experiences or stories, but when working together as a community, they are able to extend or refine their practices. 

Although the concept of communities of practice has been around for thousands of year, the language initial defined by Lave and Wenger (1991) has allowed researches, companies, organization and educational institutions to look closer at the mechanisms that interact to make successful or less successful communities of practice. Much of the application of communities of practice has been in the workplace such as Xerox service repairers (Brown & Duguid, 2000), insurance claim operators (Wenger, 1998), and innovation in cancer treatment (Swan, Scarbrough & Robertson, 2002). However, the concept seemed to transfer well to online communities with case studies (Ardichvili, Page & Wentling, 2003; Pan & Leidner, 2003) of companies moving to on-line communities of practice and recommendations on how to design communities of practice online (Kim, 2000; Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002). However, many of the studies of communities of practice in online contexts have been based on mandated use by the practitioner, as illustrated in the case studies mentioned above. There has been some study on a pre-designed communities, such as TappedIn – a professional teaching network (Schlager & Fusco, 2004). But, what about the online spaces that are created voluntarily by the practitioners and evolve with the needs of the practitioners, rather then the needs of an administrator?