Reading Reflection #2

                Learning communities is a great way to work with other teachers, people in the community, coworkers, etc. to create ideas together and get feedback from one another about changes or good ideas. When working in a learning community you get to work on communicating with other people whether they are in your school, different schools, different states, or even different countries. It’s a great way to get to know other peoples’ ideas on project-based learning.

                The benefits of learning communities are as instructors you learn different ideas and how to use them in your classroom from other teachers who have used them previously and successfully, or collaborate on a new idea by bouncing around ideas and getting feedback from each other. By being a part of a learning community, you are learning to work as a team and cooperating together. Team work and cooperating well together are important aspects of life.

Learning communities affect teachers by working with other teachers, people in the community, and professionals to create ideas of project-based learning that will help have a deeper understanding the material of what they are learning. It helps teachers collaborate with each other because by working in a team, you must be comfortable enough to tell a team member that their idea is good bad, try something different, or to make tweak it. It also affects teachers because they as a community are focusing on student learning as the priority.

Learning communities affect students because, as stated above, the teachers who are a part of the learning community have the priority of focusing on student learning. With this as a priority, they are focusing on how they can together make project-based learning for students more interesting so students have a deeper understanding and connection with the material being taught. Through project-based learning, students are learning to work as a team, learning to communicate with each other, and work on how to problem solve.

Members in a learning community share many components to see their ideas being done in a classroom. Some of these components are a clear sense of mission, share a vision of the conditions they must create to achieve the mission, work together in collaborative teams to determine the best practice to achieve the mission, organize into groups headed by teacher-leaders, focus on student learning, are goal- and results- oriented, collaborate with each other, hold shared values and beliefs, commit themselves to continuous improvement, and see themselves as life-long learners.

Concepts in this chapter relate to my topic weather monitoring because as a group member, I need to be able to trust my group members that they will get their work done accurately and accordingly as well as providing feedback to each other on things that may need to change or good ideas. By working together, we will be able to create our project more efficiently and without some unneeded stress.