A community of practice is a group of people with a shared problem or interest who have come together to fulfill individual and group goals. Communities of practice focus on sharing best practice. An important aspect of communities of practice is ongoing interaction whether it is face-to-face or through various online means of communication or a combination of the two.
There are three characteristics of a community of practice:
Types of Communities of Practice:
Communities of practice can be an effective means of professional learning as they have the ability to:
Being involved in CoP means that interpersonal activity is activated through the sharing of tacit knowledge and common goals. Within this process, participants support mutual learning through discussions, training, the expansion on knowledge achieved by the CoP, i.e. a reading group session may lead the group to developing repositories, toolkits, seminars and similar products of the interactions that occur. The process of CoP means that a continuous stream of active knowledge exchange and building is maintained by its members.
A typical community of practice has a finite lifespan and goes through a series of overlapping phases. Each phase involves activities that help participants build knowledge and achieve goals.
Wenger (2011) has identified a a number of factors that can contribute to the success of a community of practice. The top three factors identifies are:
Contents of this guide are available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 unless stated otherwise.
This guide has been adapted from Creating Communities of Practice by Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium (ERLC) which is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
