Session 2 reading: Implications of learning communities in primary education from the perspective of teachers and pupils

Learning communities are becoming are growing in value exponentially in Primary schools for both teachers and pupils.

When looking from the perspective of a teacher, the internet has created a perfect environment for teachers across the globe to share ideas, lessons and anything else they can think of! This is evident in websites such as TES  which provide communities for teachers to come together and share resources with each other. The National College for School Leadership’s (NCSL) report ‘Creating and sustaining an effective professional learning community‘ states that ‘An effective professional learning community has the capacity to promote and sustain the learning of all professionals in the school community with the collective purpose of enhancing pupil learning’.  Here the NCSL is saying that through the sharing of professional resources online, teachers are helping each other which in turn all leads back to better education for the pupils. Despite this some argue that the huge amount of resources available has led to a ‘wood from the trees’ situation where it becomes harder for teachers to actually improve their resources because of the sheer, often un-curated,  quantity of resources available. Whilst this may be true, in reality whilst there may be a many of sub-standard resources on the internet, most professionals are able to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The benefits of online learning communities for pupils are also evident throughout contemporary education. The main example we see of this is the use of VLE’s such as Fronter, Moodle and FROG across the country. Since Tony Blair’s government introduced funding for schools to install VLE’s their use has risen with many schools across the country now fully integrating them into their whole school experience. I saw this first hand whilst on BSE, the school I was placed in used a system called Firefly which I had never seen before. What was really great about this system is it offered in built customisation offering teachers the chance to create and edit pages for anything and everything they wanted to. So for example I created a page for the pupils topic ‘A passage through India’; I would update this page weekly with pictures, information about what the children had done that week and homework questions which they could comment answers on. Through this children and parents were able to log on at home refresh or inform (respectively) themselves on what we had be doing that week.

This is just some of the implications we have seen from the introduction of online learning communities on primary schools. Evidently, both pupils and teachers are benefiting from these new powerful tools and as long as their use is continually developed it is hard to see how they won’t become an essential part of primary education in the near future.