21st Century Learning Communities

21st Century Learning Communities

By Richard Beatty

(a Reflection)

image: The Networked Teacher

Introduction

In the 21st Century, the concept of the “Learning Community” has expanded.  It has changed in fact.  In systems terminology, it has become a “complex system”, systems working in parallel feedback functions.  No longer are we limited by our physical surroundings.  The internet provides us with opportunities to connect with people in other schools, other districts, and people and groups from all over the world.  Each connection a system, working together centered around the individual who is participating in various communities, creating a complex system that might be called a 21st Century Learning Community.  

Classroom

image: Learning Together

As I am applying my 21st Century learning skills, my first thought is my classroom.  I need to develop an effective learning community within my own classroom.  How I go about doing this will affect the quality of the community I create.  My initial reaction is to build my background knowledge by reading books and online resources to build and sustain classroom learning communities.  A concurrent step would be to engage in learning communities myself, outside of my classroom as I will describe below.  At the same time, I will be building my classroom community and creating a learning environment for my students that mimic the professional learning community I am building for myself.

School

The most obvious step would be to join any learning community in my school, and if none exists, create some.  Engaging in PLC’s, book clubs, site council, PTA, etc.  Currently, at my site, we do grade level collaborations.  We are starting PLC’s.  A group of teachers went to a training.  We had one meeting officially labeled a “PLC”.  More teachers will get some training in the coming months. It seems the goal of the District is to get everyone some training and to get the PLC process started.  

District

The challenge of a local learning community is how to create a district wide learning community.  At my district, we do district wide grade level collaborations at times, but we do not have anything that might resemble a district wide learning community.  Teachers, district wide, have not yet come to rely on one another for student learning outcomes.  The current scheduling and meeting objectives are top down decisions, and there has been little to no interactions outside of the district scheduled meetings.  My district needs to empower teachers to create a district wide learning community.  We need structures in place that encourage teachers to become innovators and to share and communicate their ideas to other teachers.  I understand the district’s fear that we need district norms and procedures, and here is where we need to rethink what those norms and procedures are.  Adopting 21st Century skills as a part of the District’s Visions and Mission would be a start.  Then, establishing an environment where these skills can flourish would be essential.  The District would need to make it a part of policy to initiate, support, and sustain these efforts.

Online

The power of the internet is to connect people from all over the world.  The internet becomes the portal that connects all the various systems together.  Students in my classroom can connect with each other, with other student in the school and with students anywhere in the world.  Teachers can connect with one another at the site level, the district level, and at the county level.  One of my goals is to connect with other teachers from other nearby districts online.  I want to start with districts in my county.  I know a number of teachers from other districts that I can contact with and get started.  Beyond that, there is a world of other communities to join.  I have already started joining learning communities that are only available to me online.  Here are a few.

• National Writing Project
• Partnership for 21st Century Learning
• Mozilla Open Badges
• LinkedIn
• Blogger
• Twitter

By signing up with the online communities and engaging in them, educators can hone their own learning and develop skills that they would not be able to get solely in their immediate surroundings.

Conclusion

The internet, just by existing, solves many problems inherent in participating in learning communities.  The biggest problem is how to be in more than one place at a time.  By creating an online presence, an educator is virtually everywhere they create a digital footprint 24 hours a day.  Whether it’s creating a website for students, joining an online community, or joining a local community online, educators can contribute to various types of communities.  The 21st Century Learning Community is a Buckyball.  It expands and contracts by will of the individual member.  The concept of the learning community becomes fluid.  It become personalized to meet the needs of the individual learner.  Engaging in these various communities contributes to our achieving one of our majors goals of becoming life long learners.

Sources

• image: The Networked Teacher   
• image: Learning Together 

v2016-04-24