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ENT Gallery: Developing a Community of Practice
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Although this project did not evolve in precisely the directions or the timeframe that its designers originally imagined, it nevertheless appears to have achieved many of its basic goals. More than a year after the participants enrolled in the online course, several of them were still involved in advancing the work started in the course. After their initial pilot test, the project facilitator, MaryBeth Kinkead, and a Plimoth Plantation educator, Kim VanWormer, continued to use the Collaborative Curriculum Design Tool (CCDT) to work on the Packing for America classroom design. This classroom version would become a complementary experience for classes that take field trips to the Plimoth Plantation. In this form, teachers receive materials to do several pre-visit activities with their students. Then, when the class visits the Plantation, a portion of their visit is spent "packing for America" with museum educators.
Each group involved in the initial collaboration also undertook activities that built on the work they began during the online course:
Museum Educators-Plimoth Plantation
 The Director of Plimoth Plantation pursued additional funding for development of the Online Learning Center and intends to build on the lessons learned from the work to date: continue using the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework as a structure for designing educational offerings at the museum; continue developing an online learning center; continue collaborating with university-based educators from Harvard Graduate School of Education and the public schools. She requested that the university educators stay involved in the work as consultants to support the integration of TfU principles, effective collaboration with schoolteachers, and formative assessment of the project.
University Educators - Harvard Graduate School of Education
The university-based educators believed that the experience of working with Plimoth Plantation was valuable in several ways. It illustrated both the benefits and the challenges of trying to use new technologies to extend a community of practice focused on application of research-based pedagogies. They analyzed and presented this work at a meeting of the American Educational Research Association (April, 2002) and prepared this online case study, included in the Gallery of the Education with New Technologies website as a Picture of Practice. They were encouraged by the progress and commitment demonstrated by the museum educators and agreed to serve as consultants for the next stage of work on Plimoth's Online Learning Center.
Classroom Educators - Natick and Plymouth Public Schools
At least one of the participating teachers, Danice Larick, a Natick elementary school teacher, extended the work she had done by developing her own Internet-based curriculum unit. She used an online tool called a WebQuest to develop materials for her students to investigate the Jamestown colony. (Click here to view the WebQuest). Larick is still refining this product, which clearly extends the approach of the Packing for America unit by engaging elementary students in learning history through conducting historical inquiry and taking on the roles of historical characters. This teacher has offered to participate in field-testing the Packing for America unit in her classroom and has agreed to work with Plimoth as a collaborating teacher in the further design of Plimoth's Online Learning Center.
Facilitator
 Kinkead continued to collaborate with the Plimoth Plantation through the pilot testing of the Packing for America unit in Massachusetts classrooms (where she is shown here, on the left). She also plans to continue consulting with Plimoth during their development of the Online Learning Center, with a focus on facilitating effective relationships among school, museum, and university personnel.
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