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ENT Gallery: Developing a Community of Practice
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 Museum Educators-Plimoth Plantation
Plimoth Plantation, Inc., is a private, non-profit living history museum. It is located 45 miles south of Boston in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The museum, founded in 1947, includes several exhibits related to the Plimoth colony. The Plimoth Plantation's Education Department presents unique and diverse programs to schools, youth groups, families, and adults. The Education
Department also provides a classroom outreach program, which consists of classroom visits by museum educators. Museum representatives who participated in this collaboration included the Director of Education and three other Education staff members. These educators brought to this project their extensive knowledge of early American colonial and Native American history and their background in providing quality museum education.
University Educators & Technologies - Harvard Graduate School of Education
Leah Gotcsik, who was a graduate student at Harvard in 2001-2002, analyzed this project in one of her courses and co-authored this Picture of Practice with Stone Wiske. Shannon Martin Croft, a Project Coordinator for ENT website and the WIDE World online professional development program, also assisted in writing and producing this Picture of Practice.
Educators from the Harvard Graduate School of Education were involved in all phases of this project. Stone Wiske, the professor involved with the project, has been teaching at the School of Education and doing collaborative research with teachers for nearly 20 years. Wiske directs the Educational Technology Center and directed the project that developed the Education with New Technologies website.
The Education with New Technologies website offers a free online learning environment with "access to thoughtful colleagues, interactive tools, detailed examples of technology-enhanced education, and a valuable collection of on-line resources." The site is designed to support educators who seek to use new technologies to foster teaching for understanding. The site explicitly supports a particular educational model collaboratively developed by educators at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education called Teaching for Understanding (TfU). The TfU framework emphasizes understanding as a capacity to think and apply knowledge flexibly. It is predicated on the assumption that learning activities should engage students in active performances that both develop and demonstrate understanding.
TfU consists of four elements that help educators answer four key questions:
1. What topics are worth understanding?
Focus curriculum on Generative Topics that connect to students' interests and experience, are central to the subject matter, and can be approached through multiple entry points.
2. What about these topics needs to be understood?
Define explicit Understanding Goals that address key content, methods, purposes, and forms of expression in the target subject area; structure goals in a progression that relates goals for individual lessons and units to overarching goals; state these goals publicly.
3. How can we foster understanding?
Engage students in performances of understanding, also called Understanding Performances, that cause students to stretch their minds and think with what they know, not simply recall information or rehearse routine skills; include a range of performances that engage multiple learning styles and modes of analysis; and design a sequence of performances that ramp students up from their beginning capabilities to the target understanding goals.
4. How can we tell what students understand?
Incorporate Ongoing Assessment of student products and performances, using public criteria that are directly related to understanding goals; conduct frequent assessments of draft performances that generate suggestions for improving student work; involve learners in peer- and self-assessments.
TfU recommends using these four elements together in a coherent way to guide the design and implementation of curriculum focused on developing and demonstrating learners' understanding of important topics.
 One of the Education with New Technologies site's central resources is the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool (CCDT), an interactive online workspace that allows learners to develop curriculum designs collaboratively using the principles of TfU. The graphic to the right provides an image of the CCDT workspace.
The museum, classroom and university educators discussed within this Picture of Practice used the CCDT to begin developing their curriculum unit when enrolled in the online course Teaching to Standards with New Technologies. In addition to helping the participants structure their design around TfU, the tool also allowed them to post, update and critique one other's work in structured design areas, and to communicate with one another using the CCDT message boards.
Stone Wiske served as the course instructor for the group of educators enrolled in Teaching to Standards with New Technologies. Wiske had developed the course and, along with colleagues David Perkins and Cliff Baden, co-founded the online professional development initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education known as WIDE World (Wide-scale Interactive Development for Educators), which hosts the course.
Classroom Educators - Natick and Plymouth Public Schools
Three elementary-level teachers from Natick, Massachusetts, and two elementary-level teachers from Plymouth, Massachusetts (which reflects the modern spelling of Plimoth) were invited by the Plimoth Plantation educators to participate in the online course Teaching to Standards with New Technologies. These school-based educators were recruited to the project based on their grade level experience, their interest in social studies curriculum and their interest in developing a unit using technology. The three Natick educators have between two and twenty years of classroom teaching experience; one of the Plymouth educators is a social studies coordinator, while the other is a teacher of gifted and talented students. Plimoth Plantation staff counted on the teachers to use their knowledge of state and local social studies standards, as well as their experience with elementary level students, to help the Plantation create a prototype that would be aligned with local schools' curriculum priorities.
Facilitator
MaryBeth Kinkead is an elementary level teacher who has taught in both public and private settings. Wiske recruited Kinkead to become the WIDE World coach who would support the Plimoth group during the course. Kinkead had expertise with the online course, a particular interest in using new technologies to enhance learning in elementary classrooms, and familiarity with with Plimoth Plantation, where she had taken her classes on field trips. In addition to coaching the group through the course, Kinkead evolved into a project facilitator for the Plimoth group, or in her words, "an intermediary whose job it is to build communication bridges between groups or individuals such as instructor to learner, museum educator to teacher."
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