Community of Practice
A page within Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL)
UWL Communities of Practice: Academic Year 2023/2024
What is a Community of Practice?
Communities of Practice (COP), sometimes called faculty learning communities at other universities and colleges, are innovative and community-oriented ways to build your teaching portfolio. These communities are designed to be cross-disciplinary and help faculty/Instructional staff engage in active, collaborative, long term projects oriented toward enhancing teaching and learning within our community (Cox, 2004).
A community of practice is not a static, one-time event but rather an ongoing collaborative learning experience for everyone involved. As a member of the small group (max of 12 participants), you are expected to be an active participant for the entirety of the experience by attending all of the group meetings (1x a month for the rest of the academic year), engage in conversations, and perhaps lead discussions based around area(s) of interest to you relate to our overall theme.
Our overarching goals will be to: Connect people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to interact; enable a dialogue between the members of the UWL instructional community; stimulate your interest in learning through self-reflection and peer mentoring; help you organize your actions to deliver tangible results; and, transform your teaching practice.
Communities of Practice have long been agents of change for quality instruction within institutes of higher education. They are designed around the following three characteristics (Wegner-Trayner, 2015):
1. Community: The learning community members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other and care about their standing with each other. Of utmost importance is the formation of a community space. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone.
2. Domain oriented: 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.
3. Practice: 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.”
Additional Goals of UWL COPs
Additional goals of our learning communities are as follows:
- Support instructor (Faculty/IAS) learning and reflection on topics relevant to current identified needs (specifically to the theme of the COP).
- Build our community through discussions of our shared work as educators.
- Provide a supportive framework for instructors who seek to implement specific changes to their teaching related to the learning community theme.
- Disseminate our achievements in one of the following modalities:
- at a conference (i.e., CATL conference in the Fall),
- creation/curation of a website featuring the outcomes of our experience,
- the design and implementation of a workshop for our colleagues,
- and/or preparation of manuscripts for publication.