1. Peer Facilitated Learning
Community of Practice
Welcome! We’d like to take the next 20 to talk about the Community of Practice model and another 10 minutes to answer any questions you may have. Our hopes are to begin a Evidence Base Practice CoP within our agency soon with your support because as the title suggests this really takes a community to build.
How many of you have been apart of meetings, work groups, committees or trainings that seemed endless, spun around and around in circles, never getting anywhere, where you were bored to tears, your comments and feedback weren’t allowed or expected?
How the other end of that picture, how many of you have felt that you were truly part of a team, where your voice was heard, your opinion valued and you were a contributing member of a group that worked highly effectively together to find results or learn together?
Big difference in energy, being present, feeling valued, etc., right?
Peer Facilitated Learning

2. Community of Practice
The key spirit with CoP is that no one person is in charge of someone’s learning. Instead members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other and share information.
Members develop a shared repertoire of resources:
Experiences
Stories
Tools
Practice opportunities
Deeper conversations
Common ground for continued learning, continuality of learning
Provides an opportunity for staff to take on more of a leadership role
Assists with adaptive change
Begins to shift the culture of the environment more to a learning organization
Wenger’s (2008) key characteristics for a community of practice: joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and shared repertoire. Each of those is accomplished via various methods, like doing things together for mutual engagement, stories for a shared repertoire, and mutual accountability for joint enterprise

3. Community of Practice
Is an informal, peer-facilitated gathering that convenes regularly to consolidate and continue learning and practicing skills that were acquired during training and follow-up coaching sessions
How many of you have heard of the term Community of Practice? What are some of the things you’ve heard?
With the last slide, we talked about the two extremes. What about the middle ground? The committee or training where you felt motivated to implement what you’d learned or to take action steps, only to find that the binder from the training or your meeting notes are covered with dust on a shelf a year later, thinking, “Oh year, I forgot all about that”. How many of us have done that?

4. Community of Practice Technical Change Adaptive Change
Problem is clear, solution is known
Change is typically visible, measurable and trainable
Solution is usually plug and play, get it right and you are done
Short term pain while learning new skill
Requires a new skill
Problem not easy to define, solution must be created collaboratively
Change may be internal, hard to measure, and may take more than training
Takes time to create and test a solution, requires feedback and revision
Long term discomfort due to uncertainty
Requires a new mindset
Adaptive changes require more than simply training. Evidence base practice is all about taking theory into practice. EBP requires a big skill set, including, but not limited to:
Assessment – accurately interpreting scoring rules, using good interviewing skills to elicit from the client, a good understanding of how to interpret the results, and providing normative feedback in a way that can be heard by the client.
Using Motivational Interviewing skills to effectively work with clients in regards to their wanting to make changes, and using this information in a way that lends itself to case planning.
Research is showing that cognitive behavioral techniques (when implemented properly) reduce recidivism to a great deal, and probation officers are being trained to conduct CBP with their clients during one-on-one sessions.
For many staff, this will ongoing training, practice and feedback. For others, it may require a whole new mindset.

5. Community of Practice
“Taking about MI is not as likely to promote learning as actually practicing skills within a supportive learning community.”
Miller and Rollnick Motivational Interviewing, 3rd Edition
Research shows us that formal classroom training isn’t necessarily the best way for people to learn and integrate the skill into their day to day practice. The key to successful learning is by practicing and teaching others. Classroom provides more of an introduction of a new skill, whereas, practicing within a supportive community is all about integration and being responsible for your own learning
New roles are emerging as well…

6. Community of Practice Collaborator vs. Expert Coach vs. Teacher
Leader vs. Authority
Questions vs. Answers
Overseeing vs. Overstepping
CoP’s have different relationships with the agency. Roles may be formal or informal People are an organization's most important resource, yet we seldom understand this truism in terms of the communities through which individuals develop and share the capacity to create and used knowledge.
Members of a community are informally bound by what they do together by engaging one another and by what they have learned through their mutual engagement of activities. Again, a CoP has three components that define it:
It has a joint enterprise, as understood and continually renegotiated by it’s members
The relationships of mutual engagement binds members together into a social entity.
The shared repertoire of communal resources that members have development over time begins to build and/or produce

7. Community of Practice Problem-Solving Skill Practice
Requests for Information
Seeking experience
Sharing assets
Coordination and Synergy
Discussing developments
Documentation projects
Visits
Mapping knowledge and Identifying gaps
What do CoP’s look like? Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities. This slides shows various examples.
Examples:
Problem-Solving “I’m just not sure how to use MI when there are so many mandated conditions to enforce.”
Skill Practice “I’m really struggling with Complex Reflections. Let’s do a round robin reflection exercise.”
Requests for Info. “Where can I find a list of open questions that are likely to elicit commitment talk?”
Seeking Experience “I’m not sure what to do with this client. I’ve tried everything. I’d like to hear your ideas.”
Sharing Assets “I’ve been keeping a list of complex reflections that my clients have responded really well to. I can post on SharePoint if you want.”
Coordination & Synergy “Can we combine our CoP’s next month so we can share the cost of hiring a guest speaker?” Or, “Would you be willing to loan us your trainer for next month’s
CoP to answer some questions we have about how to score the assessment?”
Discuss. Developments “What do you think of the new Program Training system?” “How can we use it even more efficiently?”
Document. Projects “We have faced this issued five times now. Let’s write down the process for resolving it.”
Visits “Can I sit in on your “what works” group? We’d like to generate some more ideas for our CoP?”
Map. Know. Id Gaps “Who know what we are missing? What other group or team should we connect with? Where might there be overlap with learning?”

8. Community of Practice
We’d like to allow some time for your questions or comments. We’re interested in hearing what you think….

9. Community of Practice
Thanks for listening!