Nabeela Kanwal

Community of Practice: School As a Learning Community Nabeela Kanwal

The beginning of the twenty-first century brought a lot of changes in the educational world. Lave and Wenger do not view learning as an individual cognitive processing but as a process of participation in communities of practice. There are lots of professional development programmes conducted for schools improvement but there are few outcomes due to several reasons. One reason could be that these programmes can not fulfill the requirements of contextual need. The second reason could be that teachers could not translate that learning into practice due to difference in context. Keeping these challenges in mind educationists introduced a school-based approach that is called Community of Practice (COP) being in which school teachers can share their concerns, successes and challenges in their own context and learn from each other. The purpose of this research is to see if COP has been understood in Pakistani schools, what has been the process of COP and how it can be sustained as one of the approaches for school improvement. It highlights some of the factors, which help teachers to improve themselves and some factors, which hinder their work