Communities of Practice

Throughout my career in teaching, I have always had the impression that there is a significant anomaly in schools. The anomaly is that in the very institutions that have learning as their core business (schools), staff learning is undervalued and underutilised. I took the opportunity to study the quality of learning environments in other institutions and industries and I was introduced to workplace learning literature. This introduction changed my perceptions, which had been predominantly influenced by my own experiences of working in schools. I developed an understanding of the value of informal learning and I decided that I wanted the learning environment for staff in our school to be more expansive.