What is a Learning Community ?
Our model of powerful learning facilitates and inspires collaboration
“Everyone you ever meet knows something you don’t”
Bill Nye
Inspiration to Connect - Collaborate – Create
A Learning Community course is designed as a journey of discovery. In a Learning Community every participant has a role to play in sharing ideas and experience and creating a collective knowledge. Learning communities create a safe space for participants to discover answers, solve problems and seek solutions together.
Learning Communities have been created in recognition of the need for new skills to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Therefore, we avoid conventional teaching methods and instead focus on creating learning processes that are grounded in practical experience. Participatory teaching methods are used to encourage critical evaluation of practice, reflexivity about personal behaviour and articulation of goals.
Learning Community Characteristics
CONNECT
A Learning Community is a high impact educational practice where a group of people, who share common learning goals, engage collaboratively to achieve them. Participants become both teacher and learner.
COLLABORATE
Learning Communities counteract isolation by connecting learners, allowing them to be deeply involved in mutually searching for understanding, meaning and solutions.
CREATE
Learning Communities are organised around a common theme, question or career goal. Learning focuses on the practical and is shared from both successful and unsuccessful experiences to create collective knowledge.
Learning Community Principles
Our Teaching Principles here at Learning Communities Network
- Self-discovered learning
- Socratic Inquiry
- Storytelling
- Self-directed, problem-solving learning
- Teach to Learn
- Biology of Empowerment
- Kinaesthetic Learning
- Right-brain engagement
- The personal is professional; the professional is personal
- Medicine Wheel
- Social Capital investment
- Talking Stick
- Practical applied learning
- Group Alchemy
The Impact of a Learning Community
A Learning Community is a group of people connected by common ambition or interest, who learn and discover together.
