Week 26

Week 26
 It is therefore important to explore different aspects of your community of practice and how these impact on you. Those aspects include shared assumptions, values, beliefs or, in other words, the organisational culture within which you operate socially and professionally.  

Activity 2: Your professional community

After reading the Class Notes, create a blog post where you provide a critical discussion of your professional community of practice in relation to any two of the following questions:
What is the organisational culture (collective values/principles) that underpins your practice? How would you contribute to fostering a positive professional environment in your community of practice?

I believe our school is what Rosenholtz identified as nonroutine/certain In the nonroutine/certain environment, teachers worked collaboratively, were involved in goal setting, and had opportunities for professional development. These, in turn, maximized students’ academic growth. 
Kleinsasser also found two types of school cultures: nonroutine/certain and routine/uncertain. The non-routine/certain culture promoted,collaboration within a community. In other words, his participating FL teachers collaborated not only with their colleagues in the FL department but they also worked with teachers from other subject disciplines, students, parents, administrators, and communities.

In our current technological age we also use technology and everything that enables students and teachers to discover both individually and collectively.

In our school the culture very much is based around working together collaboratively and with community, whanau, and when needed agencies to find the best learning and social possibilities for our kids. Our school is organised/grouped in whanau groups, consisting of 4-5 classes, year 7 and 8. These classes work individually and cross class. Pathways( specialist) programmes are run with students from each class in the pathways class.

Every 3 weeks we have whanau days, where the students from each class work with students from other classes in their whanau group. This occurs over the whole school.Pathways teachers are divided amongst the whanau teams for these days.

AS well as whanau teams we also have AKO teams, these are curriculum based and have teachers from across the school who lead these. Each AKO team has a member from each whanau team., and  they work together to develop programmes to further enhance and develop student learning and achievement.

Although it sounds complicated and confusing it allows and promotes collaboration and also means that teachers know all the kids in their whanau - not just their own class. It also means that students have at least 12 teachers that they are very familiar with and work with on a regular basis. This promotes and enables the students to have a number of teachers that they are able to form a relationship with and are there for them if they need someone to talk to or advise and guidance in any number of areas.

What changes are occurring in the context of your profession? How would your community of practices address them?

There is a huge amount of changes that are occurring in our community. Technology, ILE class rooms, changes in assessment and reporting. We are also in the middle of building new learning blocks.

Our community have addressed these changes by usually pulling together, looking for our strengths and leaning on others when we need support. Although not everyone is on exactly the same page for everything and at exactly the same stage of understanding and use in areas such as technology, assessment and collaboration with others, we do have a common goal and purpose and working towards a positive outcome for our students is at the forefront of every decision we make. 

There are times when we disagree with each other, as is normal and healthy, how ever this is most often a time where vigorous debate and accelerated learning happens for everyone. It is at these times when people are able to clearly identify their thoughts, and express these. Debate often brings clarity and the opportunity to find a common ground, dismiss ideas and actions that are no longer useful and introduce and reaffirm new ideas and therefore continued growth.. I have seen this occur  often in our learning community. Although sometimes uncomfortable, it has always produced a happy healthier closer staff, and positive outcomes for students.

Stoll and Fink (cited in Stoll, 1998) identified 10 influencing cultural norms of school improvement including:
“1. Shared goals - “we know where we’re going”

2. Responsibility for success - “we must succeed”

3. Collegiality - “we’re working on this together”

4. Continuous improvement - “we can get better”

5. Lifelong learning - “learning is for everyone”

6. Risk taking - “we learn by trying something new”

7. Support - “there’s always someone there to help”

8. Mutual respect - “everyone has something to offer”

9. Openness - “we can discuss our differences”

10. Celebration and humour - “we feel good about ourselves”” (p.10)

So, as a teaching professional, how does the organisational culture affect your practice? and how can you help to foster a positive environment in your community of practice?

What is school culture video
Every school has its own personality and feel. 
The climate of a school is how it feels, like a temperature, unique to each school. Needs to be a positive climate ( who decides that????) every student feels a part of it.

Culture = how school does things, values, traditions, treat each other. runs deeper, takes longer to address, important to have a positive and healthy school culture as it sets the tone for everything that happens in the school and for everyone associated with the school.

Dunkelblau: important part of school is that you ave to interact with people who are not like you and your family. you have to learn how to understand, work with and negotiate with people who are different from you, and may hold different values and beliefs, and may not agree with some of the things you hold dear or are important to you. Children learn what is important to them, what others value, and how does thsi all work out, Interesting his comment that you can't do that in any other palce. Climate is primarily make up of the people in it. Staff make the climate.

William Trusheim: all schools have a culture and a climate, often they have this by default and no one is actually driving either. if no one is driving the culture and climate develops on it's own.Positive culture and climate is more likely to occur if it is done with intention.Intention comes form the principal, and this is furthered through leadership and leaders in the school.

  Building a culture of success - MArk Wilson

Everyone wants a successful school.  Performance, excellence, an environment of success.

Begins with culture; begins with Principal, says and does things that show what it is, eventually it catches on, echoes the halls, hear it in peoples words, see it in their actions builds a culture.

Measure of success in culture?  How we do what we do and why we do what we do - CULTURE.

People have to be united, empowered, have to be able to do, act. stakeholders have to come together, who am I, who are we? what is it we wish to be, why, how do we do that.

SITUATING LEARNING IN COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE JEAN LAVE 

Points of interest to me

 Such a view sees mind, culture, history, and the social  interrelated processes that constitute each other, and intentionally blurs social scientists' divisions among component parts of persons, their activities, and the world.  

 Learning, it seems to me, is neither wholly subjective nor fully encompassed in social interaction, and it is not constituted separately from the social world (with its own structures and meanings) of which it is part.

Interesting phrase and aspects of learning: Craft apprenticeship in West Africa and apprenticeship among Yucatec Mayan midwives, for example, are practices in which mastery comes about without didactic structuring and in such a fashion that knowledgeable skill is part of the construction of new identities of mastery in practice. 

 Developing an identity as a member of a communil.y and becoming L%~..IH Ic.Jgtably skillful are part of the same process, with the former motivating! shaping, and giving meaning to the latter, which it subsumes

 This view implies that learning and failure to learn are aspects of the same social-historical processes, and points to relationships between knowledge ability and identity as an important focus for research. 

2014 School Culture: Teachers' Beliefs, Behaviors, and Instructional Practices Chantarath Hongboontri Mahidol University, chantarath.hon@mahidol.edu Natheeporn Keawkho

School cultures are unique, created and recreated by people considered members of a context.

Influential, shape and reshape what people do, think, and feel.

 Rosenholtz identified two types of school cultures; i.e., nonroutine/certain and routine/uncertain. In the nonroutine/certain environment, teachers worked collaboratively, were involved in goal setting, and had opportunities for professional development. These, in turn, maximized students’ academic growth. In contrast, teachers in the routine/uncertain environment worked in isolation, had little (or almost no) involvement in school goal setting, and had fewer opportunities for professional development. Students’ performances were, as a consequence, minimized.