COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE IN SCHOOL

A community of practice (CoP) is group of people with the same interest and goal at particular area in a way to gaining new knowledge related to their field. CoP can exist online, such as within a blog or forum in internet, or in real life, such as in a teacher’s room during the free period or at the school canteen during break time.

The structure of CoP consists of 3 phases (Wenger, 1998). The first phase is mutual engagement. At this phase, each member gets to know each other and build the collaborative relationship among them. This relationship will bind the members of the community together as a social entity. Secondly is the joint enterprise. At this phase, the members create a shared understanding of what binds them together through their interactions. The joint enterprise is negotiated by its members and is sometimes referred to as the ‘domain’ of relationship. The third phase is shared repertoire. At this phase, the community produces a set of communal resources which is used in the pursuit of their joint enterprise and can include both literal and symbolic meanings.

CoP participation is not appropriate for non-practitioners because all members need to withdraw their own perspective, knowledge and experience actively. The membership is dependent on expertise where one should have at least some recent experience performing in the role or subject area of the CoP.

Lots of benefits can be gained from CoP. Instead of saving our time for formal meeting, it can build the strong relationship among the members as they will support and motivate each other. It also can develop the communication skills among the members as they participate in the discussion actively.

One of example of  CoP can be done at school is the idea sharing among the small group of senior and junior teacher in way to help each other to improve their teaching and learning process in the classroom. The community can be in the same subject as the will discuss about the student’s attitudes toward the subject, for example mathematics. As they already have the same common of the subject they teach and the relationship already build up as workmates, they can simply straight to the issue that need to be discuss. The discussion need not to be formal as it more on sharing idea, knowledge and experience about handling the mathematics class for certain students and topics. From here, junior teacher will share their fresh idea and senior teacher will share their valuable knowledge and experience in order to come out with the new technique of creating the conducive and constructive atmosphere for mathematics class. Each teacher got the freedom and opportunity to voice out their mathematics class circumstances, their lesson problem in the classroom, student’s uncontrolled behavior or the easier way to teach the hard topics for the lower intellectual level of students. The discussion can be done in the staff room while every mathematics teachers are free. After getting the new ideas about how to solve their problems, all mathematics teachers can update among them from times to times about the progress of the ideas in way to support and motivate each teachers of this community of practice.