Series: Community of Practice - English

Community of Practice – English looks at helping students to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose. ABOUT COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Communities of practice (COP) are co-created opportunities for individual and organisational professional development. Collectively, CSA seeks to devise and direct a coherent, school-led approach to staff development, share material and human resources and encourage active participation at a member and organisational level. At the 2021 State Conference, an opportunity to lay foundations for future state, and countrywide collaboration opportunities between schools and the professionals within them were presented. The afternoon programme was designed to allow for school-school specialist subject dialogue. The premise of each session was quite simple: we begin with a provocation which will come in the form of short film – shot in Christian schools across the country – and featuring practitioners reflecting on four key framing questions based upon CSA’s PeRL pedagogical approach: 1. How do you develop relationship and community in your classroom? (Connection) 2. How do you facilitate and ensure that all students participate in the learning process? (Inclusion) 3. How do you support students as they discover their importance and influence in the wider community? (Justice) 4. How do you integrate and support student voice? (Voice) These questions formed the nucleus of the facilitated discussions during the afternoon sessions at the state event. The rationale was to get a cross section of practitioners talking about pedagogy. The main purpose was to enable a connection between the people, such that this was the first of many such gatherings both in person and through our digital connection platform (the CSA Collective).