Communities, communities of practice, and professional learning communities

A community is “a unified body of individuals”, “a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society”, “a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests”, or “a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2007).

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Lave & Wenger, 1991) used the term “communities of practice” to describe groups of people who interact regularly, either informally or formally, to share information, experiences, ideas, and expertise in an area of common concern (practice). A community of practice can describe a group of weavers in a pre-industrial society; groups of engineers within a company who are working on similar problems; groups of writers and producers who meet over lunch to share ideas and talk about their work; or a regular online meeting of superintendents who share problems and give one another advice.

In education, Milbrey McLaughlin and Joan Talbert (2001) define a professional learning community as a group of workers who share beliefs and responsibilities. In their groundbreaking study of teaching in high schools in California and Michigan they described both “weak” communities of teachers in which work is private and highly variable, and “strong” communities who share common work patterns, expectations and beliefs that evolve and are sustained over time. They found that strong communities may form around different expectations and practices (some reinforcing traditional approaches to teaching; some reinforcing more “progressive” approaches) and suggested that those communities could have either a positive or negative impact on students and student learning. They also found that in the high schools they studied different kinds of communities could exist side-by-side and often grew out of the teacher’s department affiliations and disciplinary associations.