33
Community The notion of a community creates the social fabric for that learning. A
strong community fosters interactions and encourages a willingness to share ideas.
Practice While the domain provides the general area of interest for the community,
the practice is the specific focus around which the community develops, shares and maintains its core of knowledge.
Wenger 1998:1 states that a community practice can be viewed as a social
learning system. Arising out of learning, it exhibits many characteristics of systems more generally: emergent structure, complex relationships, self
organization, dynamic boundaries, ongoing negotiation of identity and cultural meaning. Communities of practice are now viewed by many in the
business setting as a means to capturing the tacit knowledge, or the know- how that is not so easily articulated.
2.5.5 Fifth stage is modeling
Modeling is a key process in teaching and learning social science. The agreement is based on considering models as intermediaries between children‟s
capacity of interpreting natural facts and the multiple aspects of these facts that substantially work by representing hidden semantic con- nections and organizing
them in a comprehensive meaning. The agreement has also grown on considering models as flexible ways to understand children‟s knowledge constructions in
their efforts to master their own experiences because they provide organized
34 support guiding their interpretation of a complex phenomenon, creating the
possibility of attaining the comprehension of new phenomenologies. As an external form of representation, models have the two fold function of being
representational of something concrete and being a concrete thing to work with. Modeling deals with three aspects that we believe to be fundamental for
the understanding of the modeling process in primary science classrooms: a. Its relationship with the expert scientific knowledge,
b. Its relationship with the physical world, and c. Its relationship with interactions among members of the classroom.
2.5.6 Sixth stage is reflection
Reflection is key to engage systematic reflection on your own teaching. It is one of consistent strategies for keeping track of your teaching in implementation
of assignments, tests and class plans on an ongoing basis. It could help in keeping track of things to keep and eliminating when you teach the class again. The
summaries could help you reflecting on your teaching, providing excellent fodder
for the development of new classes and improving versions of the same class.
One of the most difficult aspects of teaching is the isolation of practitioners. Teachers spend most of their days alone in their own classrooms, with their own
students. Few opportunities are available to casually observe and easily learn from other teachers. Little time is available to consult with ones colleagues about
a difficult student, a persistent management problem, or a lesson disaster. To help fill that void, Education World offers this years teacher diaries
Reflections on Teaching and Learning. In this series, three teachers in three
35 different classroom situations take turns reflecting on their professional
experiences, problems, successes, and concerns. Reflections help you as you face your own classroom experiences.
Technological or formulaic thinking is based on prepackaged knowledge from an external source. It relies on practices that have proven efficient
and effective. For example, teachers might adopt general policies and rules that are part of a school culture. In deciding how to teach a concept,
curriculum teams might adopt standardized instructional procedures they believe will result in greater student learning.
Formulaic thinking works for many routine decisions: how a classroom teacher takes attendance, transitions students from subject to subject,
implements emergency drills, and so on. As long as routines function effectively, there is no need to change them. Likewise, there may be
instructional practices that demand that the teacher follows a prescribed set of steps.
When teachers make decisions using situational thinking, they focus only on information embedded in a specific context at a specific time, such as
student behavior they are observing in the moment. They reflect quickly and act on a problem immediately. A teachers day is full of appropriate
opportunities for situational thinking. For example, when a students behavior is off-task, the teacher might use a low level of intervention such
as eye contact to remind the student to focus on work. But situational thinking doesnt look beyond the surface to consider root
causes of problems. If a teacher is unable to look beyond the realities of
36 the immediate, frustrating situation, situational thinking can lead to
spinning ones wheels rather than to quick reflection that halts a problem in its tracks.
2.5.7 Authentic assessment
