Communities of Practice
Throughout my career in teaching, I have always had the impression that there is a significant anomaly in schools. The anomaly is that in the very institutions that have learning as their core business (schools), staff learning is undervalued and underutilised. I took the opportunity to study the quality of learning environments in other institutions and industries and I was introduced to workplace learning literature. This introduction changed my perceptions, which had been predominantly influenced by my own experiences of working in schools. I developed an understanding of the value of informal learning and I decided that I wanted the learning environment for staff in our school to be more expansive.
The dominant model of theorising about learning in workplace learning literature is centred on a social and participatory perspective. Central to Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work was the social community, and the processes, relationships and experiences that underpin the participants’ feelings of belonging and how this influences the extent of their learning in the workplace. Their belief (Lave and Wenger, 1991) was that learning could be viewed as a feature of practice, present in all sorts of activities within the workplace, and not constrained to clear cases of training or apprenticeship. Billett (2001) details the rich learning that occurs outside of formal educational institutions and inside workplaces, and cites the examples of the learning experiences of hairdressers and tailors. The argument is that rich learning experiences are implicitly able to take place in such workplaces even if the primary purpose of the activity is not designed to support learning. This suggests that the propensity of the workplace learning environment to provide both formal and informal learning opportunities for teachers can determine the quality and sustainability of teachers’ learning experiences.
The term ‘communities of practice’ was introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991) to describe the learning that takes place as an integral dimension of social practice. Their seminal text, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) offered a new theorisation of learning and was initially aimed at a specialist academic audience, particularly for those within the field of education studies. Their work represented a backlash against the standard paradigm of learning in moving beyond the school-centric approach and described the learning that takes place beyond the classroom and beyond traditional conceptions of teaching. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theorisation on situated learning has been influential in the work of a number of theorists on workplace learning (for example Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2004, 2005; Elliot, 2007). Communities of practice is widely considered to be one of the most influential concepts to emerge within the social sciences in recent years and is centred on the notion of ‘situated learning’.
If the argument of the value of informal workplace learning is related to schools, it could be suggested that deep teacher learning can take place if workplace activities are designed to additionally incorporate opportunities for learning. An example would be the extent to which the school provides an environment that supports collaborative working through practices such as year group planning or peer learning through lesson observations. Consequently, some school learning environments may be viewed as more supportive and conducive to teacher learning than others. Research evidence undertaken by Darleen and Pedder (2011) on professional learning in England highlighted the finding that higher achieving schools had a greater capacity to support teacher professional learning because of a greater emphasis on the development of conditions that promoted social capital, such as trust, opportunities for collaboration and networking.
What I realised from the literature on workplace learning was the fact that schools could vary in the extent to which they provided an expansive learning environment for teachers, and that school leaders hold a significant influence on the quality of teacher learning experiences. The leadership within the school therefore appears to be in a position to make decisions that can have a positive or negative impact upon the learning environment, both in terms of conscious decisions to provide formal learning opportunities and unconscious decisions that promote a positive learning environment. Schools are able to make decisions on the allocation of resources to support teacher professional learning both within school and outside school and the practical activities that are provided to support teacher learning. Examples of these activities include opportunities for: observing others, mentoring and coaching, collaborative working and opportunities to take risks and make mistakes (Marsick, 2009; Darleen and Pedder, 2011; Evans et al., 2006). These examples appear to suggest that teachers are constrained or supported by the resources that are provided for them and that leaders are crucial in making decisions about the allocation of these resources, and therefore in the determination of an expansive school learning environment. Leaders will have the ability to influence the activities in the workplace to the extent that learning becomes an integral part of everyday practices, as well as the extent to which they provide positive or negative support for their teachers’ learning (Eraut, 2004; Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2005).
