Communities of Practice

This week I have been reading information about differentiating classroom instruction and creating communities of practice. The latter is what I would like to focus on the most during first semester. Through communities of practice, enriching instructional strategies will emerge. Today I read Transforming Education Through Communities of Practice by Tony Wagner. This article made some really valid and well supported statements about the need for communities of practice.
Wagner first points out that good coaches for teaching and leadership are virtually nonexistent, and our performance is rarely critiqued by others. In my personal experience, my first four years of teaching were never truly evaluated. I remember having an administrator come into my classroom once a semester to do a 1/2 hour evaluation. After the evaluation, we had a post evaluation meeting where we discussed performance, not instruction. Currently, my students are responsible for my evaluation. I also complete an annual report at the end of each year that I discuss with one faculty member. While I think evaluation of practice is important, I don't think that my true performance as a teacher has ever really been discussed with others in a collaborative, supportive environment. With that being said, how can we improve or learn our practice if we rely only on ourselves or the limited feedback of others. How does a skilled musician, doctor, athlete learn? They do so through the coaching, collaboration, and critiquing of others. So, why do we not do this as teachers? Really, that question does not matter. What does matter is that we need to start collaborative communities not only to help our own practice, but to benefit others and our students. In his article Wagner states that "nearly every profession has reinvented itself to create forms of collaborative problem-solving except education." He also makes the point that people work in teams at all levels of organizations, helping to embrace challenges and find solutions more effectively. We want our students to interact, collaborate, problem solve, question, and we don't expect them to do that alone. So, why should we?