“Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.”—“from Cultivating Communities of Practice” by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder
One of the goals of CETL is to bring faculty together from across the campus to discuss teaching and learning issues. To this end, we began our work with learning communities around various topics of interest to faculty. This year we have a number of groups that we now refer to as “Communities of Practice” (CoP) We hope to encourage faculty to talk to one another about teaching and learning but to also share the knowledge they develop with others on campus and beyond. We have had great success in our program that can be attributed to faculty volunteering to join a Community and meeting on a regular basis during the entire academic year. At least one of our Communities has been meeting for three years.
Each fall new Communities are developed by faculty who suggest topics they think are important and helpful. For the 2007-2008 academic year CETL is sponsoring the following CoPs are meeting at least once a month:
Department Chairs (year three)
SoTL (first year with a $23,000+ grant by MSU)
Teacher Education (first year)
Online Educators (year two)
Critical Thinking (first year)
Cooperative Learning (first year)
