Teacher Learning Communities

Our South Australian teaching guidelines are actually very practical and helpful. We have some on building teacher learning communities from Dylan William’s Changing Classroom Practice 2007. If you Google building teacher learning communities it will come up as 1 3A13 Teacher Learning Communities and download as a pdf file as soon as you click on it I understand what we are trying to do now that I have read that whole document. It gives the details of the format of the groups and the specific meeting plan. This is the process we are trying for our Teacher Learning Communities for the the national curriculum. The meetings run for 2 hours and there are about 10 of us in each group. The meeting format seemed a bit hard to get used to last time but essentially it is a strong format if you look at it. Part of the process is each teacher has to try and achieve something from one meeting to the next along agreed lines and then report back at the next meeting. Each teacher has to devise an action plan and part of the meeting is given over to teachers having the chance to form their personal action plan. The belief is that this process will help us learn but also become better teachers because we shall understand certain processes better.