"Leave me alone so i can teach better": community of practice as the foundation to great teaching

Abstract

An alternate paradigm to school organization and teaching practice, which is not widely known, is to be explored to unders- tand what it is to teach under this approach. In opposition to the dominant paradigm –regarding instructors as solo artists- this other conception views the teaching task placed into a commu- nity, requiring some coordination and collaboration. Regarding this as its core idea, what sets a great teaching school apart is the self-awareness of cohesion, coordination, exchange of best practices, alignment of values around service to student learning, and sense of mission about being a good example to other instructors and schools. With the concept of “community of practice” being widely explored by both business and aca- demia, it was established that what made a firm resilient and profitable was its ability to learn and spread knowledge, that is to say: organizational learning and knowledge transfer. What distinguished the more successful service people? They called one another when they encountered fresh problems, whereas the less successful people were loners. The core notion of this field is that greatness in an organization is more than a collec- tion of solo performances. A community of teaching practice looks like a psychologically safe environment where teaching is valued by the community and teaching knowledge is trans- ferred by both formal and informal means. Doing nothing about teaching is not an option.