Reading Reflection 2: p. 25-40

The focus of Learning Communities is to create new opportunities for teachers to work together and overcome the traditional isolation of the profession. Some of the benefits of implementing Learning Communities is that through the small sized collaboration, faculty can share ideas about teaching and serve as friendly critics by suggesting ways to improve lessons and classroom management. Teachers can also help evaluate students’ work and see what kind of quality of work that students can produce in different settings with different teachers. By doing this, it results in a greater appreciation of students’ talents and raised expectations of even the lowest-performing students. (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2005) Learning Communities are beneficial to students because they allow room for innovation. By planning lessons together and giving and receiving advice on how to help students, teachers gain respect for one another. These LC’s promote honesty and trust, and help to build an appreciation for who is working together. LC’s help to decrease teacher isolation, increase commitment to the mission, share responsibility, create more powerful learning learning experiences, and make more of a fundamental, systematic change. (Hord, 1997) Overall, these Learning Communities make the professional life of teachers more productive and satisfying. Learning Communities affect students by providing them with more than one mentor to help them in the process of learning. Since there are multiple teachers helping a group of students, the students can feel more comfortable opening up to at least one of the teachers instead of staying isolated if they don’t manage to find a connection with one teacher if they were in a traditional learning environment. By having more than one teacher viewing the students’ abilities to work and learn, they are able to find new ways to make things “click” with them, which allows them to become better learners all together. Some of the components for shared vision in Learning Communities would be that there is a clear sense of a mission, an understanding for what must be done to achieve the mission, work collaboratively in teams to determine the best practice, organize groups headed by teacher-leaders, the focus is on student learning, must be goal-and results-oriented, collaborate with each other, hold the same values and beliefs, commit themselves to continuous improve, and view themselves as life-long learners. This process of creating Learning Communities can be related to my topic and project because we are using teamwork to create a larger project for our students. We use collaboration to come up with what we believe to be the best strategies for our project. It is said that “a team of two is better than no team at all” on page 35, and we have THREE, instead of two! We are able to use each other to bounce ideas off of each other, instead of staying isolated in projects and assignments throughout the semester.