Reading Reflection #2 Learning Community

    The focus of Learning communities is to bring a group of people together, for them to share ideas and expectations. They can talk to each other about their lesson plans and get feedback; they gain new ways of learning together. It also focuses on student-centered ideas; making sure that the students are learning, that the school is improving, and that we are seeing results.

    There are many benefits to Learning Communities including, a decrease in teachers feeling isolated, more people committed to projects, responsibility is spread out among many people, and there will be a higher likelihood of fundamental, systemic change.

    Learning Communities really help teachers. It’s a way for them to get input from their colleagues about projects and lessons plans. They can receive critical feedback that can make their plans better. It’s also a way for the staff to get along. When everyone is able to work with one another things tend to run more smoothly. But I think the most important thing is teachers can gain knowledge from the co-workers and add things to their plans they may never had thought of before. 

    The students benefit a lot from learning communities. They may only have one teacher teaching them the material and doing the projects but the information that they are being taught is a combination of all of the knowledge from many teachers. For these students, weather they know it or not, they are being taught by all of the teachers and gaining information from all of them in some way.

    When two people have the same idea for a project they work together to find the best ways to teach the lesson. They both do research and share with each other what they discover. Once the project is started, the students from both classrooms can communicate and gain more information from each other. When classes are done, they can present their projects to each other and they will learn from it. They can see what the other class put into their project that they didn’t and vise versa. Students learn more from each other then in many other ways.

We can use this information in our project by talking with other schools and seeing what they do to recycling, like how they collect and what they do with it after. We can talk with staff from the school and ask them how they got started recycling and if they have any tips that can help us.