Communities of Practice: Learning as Participation

The October issue looks at communities of practice, those places where we develop our competencies by interacting with other people. We all belong to many such groups—families, sports teams, church groups, book clubs, etc.—and developing similar communities in the classroom allows students to contribute their past experiences to the collective knowledge of the group. In this issue of School Talk, a first-grade teacher and a fifth-grade science teacher share their stories of communities of practice at work in their classrooms.