Reading Reflection 2

This week’s readings focused on building a professional learning community. The text described a learning community as the collaboration between teachers and students to further develop an experience. It seems that many of the teachers in the text talked about how they felt very isolated in their profession and this should not be the case. The main focus of a learning community is collaboration among professionals. Collaboration is a great way for teachers to share ideas and should be valued in the school system. Whether collaboration occurs between other teachers in the school or across the country there are many benefits that result from the learning community. First and foremost, collaboration allows teachers to share ideas about teaching and offer constructive feedback in order to improve lessons and classroom management. Collaboration also gives teachers the opportunity to learn more about different technological tools that they can use in their classrooms. Within a learning community, a teacher should never feel isolated because their work is a supportive team effort. The learning community affects teachers in many ways. As stated before, it decreases teacher isolation by giving individuals the opportunity to bounce ideas off of other teachers and to receive constructive feedback on those ideas. Teacher collaboration is valuable because other teachers may be able to suggest ideas that another teacher has not thought of. Different perspectives may make a project better or prevent it from going array once it is set into practice. The learning community affects students in many ways. Students benefit when teachers come together to make a project a better learning experience for them. When students are working on a project within their own learning community, they are working to solve real world problems. Students use skills such as brainstorming, communicating with other students and project management. These are all important skills that are practiced in project based learning and are developed in a learning community. A shared vision is important concept in learning communities. When teachers and students come together in the learning community, they share a common goal. The common goal is important because when people work together toward a specific goal, they create change in order to meet that goal. When building a learning community it is important to have everyone on the same page so that everyone can continuously improve. Our project in this class will rely heavily on collaboration between me and my partners. Throughout the process, it will be imperative that we discuss our ideas together and work toward a common goal. In our learning community, we will be able to suggest different ideas and receive constructive feedback on those ideas. Collaboration between the three of us will be important in order to be successful in this class.