Building a Community of Practice

What is a community of practice? In our terms, it's a group of people who endorse a shared set of principles and who help one another put those principles into practice.

Members of the ENT community endorse and attempt to apply a set of learning/teaching principles called the Teaching for Understanding framework. As the ENT design team (including faculty and graduate students at Harvard's Graduate School of Education), we believe the ENT online learning environment and activities ought to reflect the principles of Teaching for Understanding. In that way members of this community practice walking our talk.

How well does your learning in the ENT community reflect the principles of Teaching for Understanding?

  1. Generative Topics-do the tools, resources, and activities in this site help you address your central concerns and interests?
  2. Understanding Goals-are the goals of the site explicit and focused on developing the understanding of community members? Are you clear about your own learning goals and how to advance your understanding in this site?
  3. Performances of Understanding-does the ENT site engage you in active learning through performances that develop and demonstrate your understanding?
  4. Ongoing Assessment-does the ENT site provide opportunities for you to reflect on your learning products and performances, to assess them in relation to explicit criteria linked to goals, and to get regular feedback from colleagues and consultants?
Teaching for Understanding requires learners to join in defining goals and assessing growth in understanding so that they share responsibility for teaching and learning within a community of practice. If you think of ways to make learning in the ENT community more consistent with the principles of Teaching for Understanding, please post a note to the site feedback forum in the Meeting Hall.