1. Creating and Developing Communities of Good Practice
Kristine Mason O’Connor
17th April 2012
Congratulations on your award of Learning and Teaching Fellow at the University of the West of England.
Today celebrates your achievement to date as committed inspirational teachers and also marks your membership of a community of practice which has the potential for sustaining and supporting your enthusiasm and expertise; developing and enhancing student learning; and contributing to the ethos and reputation of the university.

2. Learning and Teaching Fellows Award Celebration
Recognises and celebrates your individual inspiration, expertise and commitment to good practice in teaching and enabling student learning
Denotes your membership of a community of good practice with its potential for advancing teaching and learning across the institution and beyond
Behind each individual award lies a vast invisible hinterland of preparation, assessment, curriculum design. By virtue of your award you are all individual, inspiring, committed teachers. Being part of a community of practice with others supports and sustains individual enthusiasm to benefit your teaching, your students’ learning and the ethos and reputation of the university. I see it as an agent of transformation. The community of practice is greater and more effective than the sum of its individual parts. The points I’m going to make are a challenge both to you (i.e membership of a cop means more of your time and effort) and to the university, to sustain and enable its development.
(all things that I have done) .
It’s important to emphasise that as well as your active membership the university has a responsibility for creating conditions and resources to support it as well as being open to the kinds of challenges the CoP may propose in terms of questioning current instituional practices.

3. Communities of Practice
‘Mutual engagement and learning
are at the heart of the “community of practice” which is defined both by its
membership and by the practice
in which the membership engages’
(Laluvein 2010)
CoPs have always existed where people with joint interests have got together to pursue a common aim. (Though not a team). Ettiene Wenger is credited , or credits himself, with coining the term. I prefer Laluvein’s characterisation. Today I want to share some practices of creating and developing a community of good practice based on research and my own experience as Dean of Teaching and Learning Development. These are all based on collaborative working. Last year the government was consulting on its white paper, Students at the heart of the system’. One phrase caught my eye which was student evaluations ‘stimulating competition between the best academics’; I wrote the following to the National Teaching Fellows list and got an overwhelming response of agreement: ‘The assumption in the White Paper that ‘competition between the best academics’ is the way to improve student learning implies that evidence for one of the criteria for NTF should be changed from ‘supporting colleagues and influencing support for student learning’ to evidence of ‘competing effectively with colleagues’ – though the word colleague hardy seems appropriate in this context. From my experience of working in a university which has successfully nominated 12 NTFs it was the culture of collegiality, cooperation and collaboration which was significant’.
Wenger; 3 aspects: Domain; participation; practice.
[ this approach emphasises the social and collaborative aspect of learning]

4. Communities of Good Practice in Teaching and Learning
Engaging in collaborative....
enquiry
reflection
dissemination
partnerships

5. Communities of good practice in teaching and learning
Engaging in collaborative....
enquiry
reflection
dissemination
partnerships

6. Collaborative enquiry
‘it is through learning and continuous engagement with teaching-specific problems that we can enhance our practice’ (Kreber et al 2005)
Seeing teaching ‘problems’ as research problems (Bass 1999)
Engaging with current knowledge/research about teaching and learning
Contributing to this knowledge/research
Bass (1999) compares our different attitudes to research problems and teaching problems. Whereas research problems are a ‘good thing’ that academics are only too happy to discuss and debate with colleagues, often ‘teaching problems’ have been seen as implying a fault or deficiency in the teacher.
Bass, R. (1999) Bass, R. The Scholarship of Teaching: what's the problem? Inventio, 1(1), pp.1-9.
Engaging with existing literature: (some years ago me on the Learning Curve; we engage with the lit in our disciplines); engaging with research provides firm evidence base for our work.

7. Approaches to collaborative enquiry
Institutional pedagogic research and scholarship centre (s)
Seed funding for projects
Writing retreats
(Inter) disciplinary bids for external funding e.g. Higher Education Academy

8. Communities of good practice in teaching and learning
Engaging in collaborative....
enquiry
reflection
dissemination
partnerships

9. Collaborative reflection
‘We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience’ John Dewey
Approaches:
Action learning sets
Peer review of teaching
Mentoring
We promote experiential, reflective learning among our students, but what opportunities do we have ourselves.
Peer review long established practice in publishing research papers or submitting papers to conferences. My co-edited volume with David Gosling ‘Beyond Peer Observation of Teaching’.
Peer support – drawing on our own expertise (like peer review of p ubs)

10. Communities of good practice in teaching and learning
Engaging in collaborative....
enquiry
reflection
dissemination
partnerships

11. Dissemination
Being open to challenge and critical scrutiny prevents communities of practice becoming self referencing and insular
Approaches:
Staff and student forums, seminars, conferences
(e) journals
discussion lists

12. Dissemination
‘As institutions we might better improve the learning of our students by making [academics’] intellectual work in teaching visible for discussion and collaboration than by inviting our colleagues to discover new frontiers in educational practice or theory (Bernstein 2010)
Communities of practice risk being
self referencing and insular and not subject to external critical scrutiny and challenge.
Communicating and making visible the outcomes of our enquiry and reflections; wider community needs to bene

13. Communities of good practice in teaching and learning
Engaging in collaborative....
enquiry
reflection
dissemination
partnerships

14. Collaborative partnerships
University communities e.g. policy development/internal consultancy
Students - partners in learning
Communities external to the university/community engagement e.g. accredited community based learning
Contribute/lead policy development related to teaching, learning and assessment (e.g. Evidence –based research on effective assessment) Grufferty – students are not consumers but partners in learning. The job of the (x said) teacher is to enable learning to take place
Internal consultants to e.g. Branding the university; design of learning spaces (notices to leave desks in rows)
Working across traditional boundaries – needs enabling by the institution.
Working in partnership with students – Huggins case study;

15. Not a conclusion...
Your Fellowship recognises your contribution as an individual star teacher and enabler of student learning Also, membership of a community of good practice with powerful potential for further illuminating and enhancing learning and teaching

16. ‘Starry night’ Van Gogh (1889)

17. ‘Starry night’ Van Gogh (1889)