My Community of Practice

My Community of Practice

My community of practice is the Corinna School teaching and learning community We are a group of professionals whose joint-enterprise is a shared vision. Our vision from The Corinna School Strategic Plan is 'Our learning community will be lifelong learners empowered to use all the key competencies to shine in a range of contexts with voice, agency and identity.' This is our joint enterprise and our commitment to it, drives our practice.

We are also inspired by our school motto ‘Expect the best’

There are many opportunities for the members of our community of practice to engage in a range of learning experiences. We meet formally and informally. These events and activities include:

• Informal discussions and learning conversations with colleagues
• Level team and whanau meetings
• Staff seminars
• Leadership meetings
• Friday morning meetings to share weekly concerns and information
• Professional development days eg Developing Inquiry Communities in Mathematics
• Courses
• Social networks
• Mindlab

The purpose of each of these activities differs and while some support the whole community of practice others support specific sub-groups within the learning community. Apart from the informal discussions, all of the other activities happen on a weekly basis. I value the informal discussions as much as the regular meetings.

 The shared repertoire that our community of practice produces includes these resources, experiences, stories, tools and ways of addressing problems include (Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner .2015) :

• Corinna curriculum

• Shared comments about curriculum and pastoral information on our school management system
• A key competency rubric
• Teacher inquiry presentations
• Meeting minutes
• Shared planning
• Google Docs
• Student learning stories on learning blogs
• Choice Reality Theory - our school-wide behaviour management system that includes a reflection sheet for students
• 3-way interview conversations

This shared repertoire enables us to collaborate and share information and ideas effectively. We also have set of co-constructed and agreed to expectations around collaboration in a document called The Corinna Handshake

 I co-teach with a colleague and have a leadership role in the community of practice. I chose to be a leader because I feel I work best in the distributed leadership model in our learning community.

I am an active member of this community of practice and feel a deep sense of connectedness to it because I believe in our vision and am totally committed to it. I feel supported by others in the community to carry out my role in it. This includes belonging to the whanau of Ngati Aroha.The students and staff stay in the same whanau within our community of practice and we all develop a real sense of turangawaewae.