Bill Montana's List: Education Research

• Communities of practice are 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.
• Three characteristics are crucial:
• The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as "expertise" outside the community
• The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.
• The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest--people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems�in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

• It is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community.

    
• Communities of practice are not called that in all organizations. They are known under various names, such as learning networks, thematic groups, or tech clubs.

• Education. Schools and districts are organizations in their own right, and they too face increasing knowledge challenges. The first applications of communities of practice have been in teacher training and in providing isolated administrators with access to colleagues. There is a wave of interest in these peer-to-peer professional-development activities. But in the education sector, learning is not only a means to an end: it the end product. The perspective of communities of practice is therefore also relevant at this level. In business, focusing on communities of practice adds a layer of complexity to the organization, but it does not fundamentally change what the business is about. In schools, changing the learning theory is a much deeper transformation. This will inevitably take longer. The perspective of communities of practice affects educational practices along three dimensions:

   
     
  • Internally: How to organize educational experiences that ground school  learning in practice through participation in communities around subject  matters?
     
  • Externally: How to connect the experience of students to actual  practice through peripheral forms of participation in broader communities  beyond the walls of the school?
     
  • Over the lifetime of students: How to serve the lifelong learning  needs of students by organizing communities of practice focused on topics of  continuing interest to students beyond the initial schooling period?
   
   

  From this perspective, the school is not the privileged locus of learning. It is not a self-contained, closed world in which students acquire knowledge to be applied outside, but a part of a broader learning system. The class is not the primary learning event. It is life itself that is the main learning event. Schools, classrooms, and training sessions still have a role to play in this vision, but they have to be in the service of the learning that happens in the world.

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