Teacher Educators’ Critical Reflection on Becoming and Belonging to a Community of Practice

Abstract

Recognition of the positive impact of Communities of Practice and increased opportunities for social learning across discipline, national and international boundaries has seen growing interest in Communities of Practice in higher education. The authors in this book articulate the theoretical foundations of Communities of Practice (CoPs), the research into their application in higher education, CoP leadership roles and how CoPs sustain and support professional learning. The theoretical and leadership focus of this book provides the foundation for, and is complemented by, a companion book, Implementing Communities of Practice in Higher Education: Dreamers and Schemers, also edited by Jacquie McDonald and Aileen Cater-Steel, and published by Springer. The companion book has a more practical focus with examples and case studies of both student and academic CoPs, applications in sciences or humanities, curriculum development and virtual communities. The two books are the result of the marvellous response of 69 submissions to the initial call for proposals, demonstrating the impressive scope and interest in higher education CoPs. The wide geographic reach of the contents of this book is indicated by the fact that there are contributions from 71 authors from seven countries (

Assessor in action: assessment literacy development in a biochemistry context

“…Specific professional development has been used to impact instructors' assessment skills and techniques (Lukin et al, 2004;Frey and Fisher, 2009;Koh, 2011;DeLuca and Klinger, 2010;DeLuca and Johnson, 2017;Yan et al, 2018). An instructor's assessment literacy can be influenced through interaction with colleagues focused on discipline-specific ideas and how to assess them (Adie, 2013;Adie et al, 2017;Allal, 2013;Fulmer et al, 2015). These interactions are different from one-off professional development opportunities in that they involve the development of a community that can be an ongoing resource for the instructor (Adie, 2013;Levy-Vered and Nasser-Abu Alhija, 2018;Sadler and Reimann, 2017;Herppich et al, 2018).…”

The Important of the Community of Practice (CoP) in Improving the Primary School Teachers’ Performance in Riau Province

“…CoP is specifically as a place for knowledge management to occur, which is defined as a place for useful and valuable knowledge, so it needs to be created, organized, shared and distributed [11], [12]. Therefore, efforts are needed to ensure that knowledge is created, captured, organized, and can be accessed and used as a valuable asset for personal development purposes [13], [14]. Evans [15] and Kramer [16] emphasize that knowledge management is an effort to create sharing knowledge and developing knowledge between individuals because knowledge has been considered a major commodity.…”