A learning community is a gathering of people where the intent is to gain knowledge. For me, my classroom is the ultimate learning community where the students work together to create and gain knowledge and I work to facilitate their exploration and am an active participant in learning alongside my students. In my classroom, the teacher and students both learn together. This week in classroom management, we read about collectivist classrooms and how the students work interdependently, cooperatively, and focus what is best for the group. This model coincides with my personal pedagogy where students work together to form a learning community to construct knowledge.
In my ideal classroom, the students will learn that I do not hold all of the answers but that each of them has knowledge from previous experiences that they can bring to each other and help us all learn something worthwhile. In my third grade classroom, for my first ELA lesson, I wanted to engage the students about the story we were reading. When I posed the simple question: "what happened in the story?" to the students, one of my students responded with "well you read it, you tell us." I responded back to the students that I did not read the story, that I really needed them to tell me what happened so they could catch me up. Once the students realized that I was not going to just give them the answer, but expected them to work with the people at their table to share and create knowledge about the story. This is how I want my learning communities to be.