Reading Reflection #2

Reading Reflection #2

What is a learning Community:

The reading made it seem as though a learning community is a collaboration of teachers and that work together as a team to develop projects  They give feedback explaining how lessons can be improved, give constructive criticism. This allows different teachers to work together and create bounds. The teachers begin to care about what their students learn, and not necessarily how they teach it. This provides opportunities to the teachers where they have options of how to solve things and discuss as a team what needs to be put in place or rules that need to be established.

The Benefits of Learning Communities:

I believe that there is an endless amount of benefits to having a learning community.  Some huge ones are allowing teachers to work with others, while giving them the opportunity to create bounds with other teachers, allowing them to help one another, being able to create a trusting relationship so you can be able to assist others. This also allows teachers to not become isolated but become encouraged to gather and share ideas that help them improve the classroom. This opens up the use of technology as a way to communicate or collaborate with other teachers. Also having a group of people around is always more beneficiary than just having one person, this leaves space for asking for help and having others suggest tips and suggestions.

How do Learning Communities Affect Students?

I think they are positively benefited because they have so many teachers that are collaborating to make things better for the children. I think that they are benefited by getting introduced to skills they would have never gotten exposed to if they were in a regular classroom doing the normal stero-typical curriculum. I also think that they are benefited by being involved in a technique that works as well as Learning Communities and also Project Base Learning. It’s a more real world type of practice and gets students prepared for working in groups and collaborating as teams.

How do Learning Communities Affect Teachers?

I think they positively affect the teachers. Its better when more brains can come together and brainstorm and be able to change or alter things that don’t work. This helps teachers by giving them other teachers to be able to trust and establish beneficiary relationships with. The teachers are less isolated and are able to talk to other teachers that they can relate to or at least offer assistance for some of the things teachers do.  Also if there are students that give teachers trouble, other teachers might have had students like them and might be able to share some pointers or things that the teacher can do to help the student.

What are the components for a shared vision in a learning community?:

Shared Visions in the learning community means that everyone is going to be communicating efficiently and clearly. It also means that they are able to get together and accomplish things by being able to work together, and having a strong sense of independence and also being responsible. Also being able to watch your students learn, but also learning with them. Everyone is learning together and also having people or students that know more could be resources for teaching the students or even other teachers.

How Do I see our group of Gardening relate to this Chapter?:

 I see teachers collaborating and working together to create a plan. Our plan is going to need to have people that are able to work as a team efficiently and effectively. We can each bring our own ideas, and we can grow from hearing other’s ideas. We are all learning from one another and we have to collaborate as a group on figuring out how we will introduce economics to the children, prepping for our class garden, contacting someone to buy the merchandise. All of these things take time and when you have more people working together it becomes less stressful and more likely to have everything go smoothly because of the team collaboration.