Chapter 2 Reflection

 A learning community can be any group of educators who want to collaborate current teaching methods, results, and learn from each other and together about other successful teaching strategies.  These groups can be small or large, and formal or informal.  It can simply be a few teachers within a school, or school district.  This group can also be formed online and through blogs.   No matter how these teachers communicate, weather its virtual or face-to-face, formal or informal, the purpose is for teachers and educators around the world to work as teams, solving problems, learning new strategies together, and supporting one another.  When teachers collaborate in these communities, they can share ideas, past ideas, and their students work to determine the best teaching ideas and methods.  Teachers were never given a lot of time together other than to plan their weeks, now with learning communities, teachers have more time to work together on specific lessons and new findings, which is overall, a learning experience for all teachers.

            This whole idea of communicating with other educators is beneficial in itself, by contacting a teacher down the hall or across the globe can really motivate and strive these teachers to learn new things and share their own teaching thoughts.  Both teachers and their students benefit from project-based learning and the learning communities, as it provides everyone with great tools and useful findings within technology that better focuses the classroom on their subjects and its shown in the results that this process is effecting teachers and students positively.  Some ways professional learning communities effect teachers include, minimizing teachers isolation, increasing their commitment, sharing responsibility, more powerful learning, a higher likelihood of fundamental, systemic change.

            I really enjoyed reading the personal stories of the many teachers who have become a part of these educational communities in their career, and how much it changed their aspect of project-based learning, and how much it affected their teaching styles, after teaming up with many different teachers.  This chapter really got me excited for becoming a teacher, and I really think that I will take advantage of a learning community, and possibly even start my own, just like a teacher from one of the examples in the book.  I also think it is great that we, pre-service teachers, are learning about these great tools now, rather than later in our career, because knowing this before even going out into the field can be very beneficial for us, especially starting out, we are going to need all of the support and help we can get from other teachers.  Additionally, in this course, by working together with our colleagues, we are already learning the fundamentals of educational learning communities, and grasping the concept of the whole notion and “practicing” it in this course, which will be very valuable for each and every one of us, when we do become educators.