Reading Reflection #2

Abigail Harrop
EDT 3470
Lab 4:00

Reading Reflection #2

1. The focus of Learning Communities is to engage with other colleagues, both in the same schools and further away to share ideas, brainstorm together, and give suggestions to each other. The main focus is collaboration, which ultimately will lead ways for people to enrich and improve their teaching, ideas, and habits. 

2. The benefit to Learning Communities is that they can have people who they feel comfortable with, can bounce ideas of, tell what worked, what didn’t work, ask for ideas, and share ideas. It allows teachers to use their time wisely to find lessons that are best for their classroom from others’ experiences and then focus more on other things such as calling home to a parent, rather than putting together hundreds of lesson plans that may not be the best for the class anyway. There is decreased teacher isolation, shares responsibility, create more powerful learning, among other things.

3. If a teacher were not in one then they may not have as many good ideas than what they would have in they were in a learning community. They would probably find that there was also a lot more work with less of a positive outcome and perhaps not the best lesson plans. Through the communities, teachers can use others ideas, ask for advice, and use the best lessons for their class from what they have learned. A lot of trust  goes into it to, so in a group people will be honest with one another so the truth about ideas will be out there, so teachers will know that what they are saying really is good or if it may need a little extra work to it.

4. In Learning Communities everything is research based and so teachers always work for hours of professional development on topics such as cooperative learning, differentiated instruction, project based learning, and reading strategies. Because of all the research and time put in by so many, the strategies being used typically will be the best, most up to date, effective ways for students to learn as proved and tested by many so they are in the best hands. They are likely to be learning in ways that have been proven to work so their schoolwork should ultimately be more enjoyable and better.

5. Some components for shared vision in Learning Communities are to collaborate with each other, share a vision of conditions with others in order to achieve their mission, focus on student learning, are goal and result orientated, hold and share beliefs, commit themselves to continuous improvement, and to see them as life-long learners.

6. These concepts relate to my topic/project with Sarah and Kent because we have a clear sense of what our mission is and we are collaborating about it. We are able to bounce ideas off of one another, we can also be honest with each other in order to achieve the best way to create our project and topic of staying healthy.