A guide for community facilitators and participants

Nurturing a successful community of practice takes a lot of time, patience, and commitment. It may seem like an impossible task at first, but with the proper planning, you can build a successful community that will benefit everyone involved.

What is a community of practice?

A community of practice is a learning community, either online or offline, that connects people with similar professional interests and goals, who contribute to and benefit from an environment of collective and collaborative learning.

Since the start of the Pandemic, we’ve all had little-to-no choice but to conduct most of our work online in order to stay safe. Online communities were already thriving before Covid took over the world. Yet since the start of the first lockdown, the demand for online tools with functionality to make collaboration easier has risen dramatically.

Creating a successful community of practice is incredibly important to us, so we’ve put together this blog post with information on how to create and maintain a collaborative learning community.

Create a positive community experience

The community should feel safe and comfortable for everyone involved in it; no one should be made to feel left out or excluded.

The code of conduct for the community must be read and agreed to by all participants. Community facilitators (or group admins if on Facebook) can ensure that these are abided by. As a community facilitator, the role is to help members learn and grow; this means setting aside your own biases and styles in order to facilitate discussion as effectively as possible.

For a community to be truly engaging and beneficial to its members, it’s important to make sure that everyone feels welcome. That means creating a safe place — one where members can feel confident that everyone else is there because they want to be.

It is important to create an environment in which everyone shares the same goals and values. To do this, relevant questions or topics can be asked in the community which can be revisited in the future and remain relevant.

Communicate the mutual benefits

Is there an objective for the community? Why should people get involved? What’s in it for them? How will you be communicating this to your members?

So many questions!

TASK: Write a list of all the ways that the community benefits its members – keep this list person-focussed, it’s not about self-promotion.

This is important because it gives every member a shared goal and something concrete they can work toward together. Make sure everyone knows what their role is in helping the community reach its goals.

Mutual benefits could include:

• Sharing knowledge and tips with each other
• Collaborative problem solving
• Bouncing ideas and asking for feedback

These benefits could be communicated by:

• Regularly scheduled live chats with other members (either with a fixed topic or a completely open agenda – e.g. “AMA – Ask Me Anything”)
• Daily ‘threads’ in a Facebook or LinkedIn Group
• Allowing all members to freely ask questions – some online communities have strict moderation or posting rules that severely limit member’s questions
• Pinned posts at the top of the page of an online community – this is a useful place to put all important information that’s easy to refer and link to
• E-mail newsletters or direct communication

These are just examples – each community of practice is different.

Encourage participation and actively invite contributions from members

To quote Michelle Parry-Slater* “We can learn from each other all of the time” To do this, we have to try to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to contribute to discussions and activities in some way, to avoid creating a perception that only a handful of people are “running” the group.

We need to make it easy for new members to join conversations. This can include the use of # for different topics or pinned posts/ links at the top of your group, page or discussion board that allow visitors to join the conversation(s) immediately.

Let new participants know how they can become involved and encourage them to participate in discussions with their own thoughts and expertise.

Allow for different levels and methods of participation

Different people have different ways of learning and participating in a community of practice. Some will want to be actively involved, but others will prefer to lurk and observe.

Tailor your community accordingly, so that everyone can participate in the way that’s most comfortable to them.

Within all communities there will be active and passive members. As tempting as it may be to try and encourage all passive members become more active, sometimes it’s more productive to accommodate more passive ways to engage with you.

Just because an individual isn’t fully active within your community, that doesn’t mean that they can’t meaningfully contribute.

TASK: Write a list of different ways for your members to participate in ways that will suite their different personas and communication styles.

For example – asking people to contribute to discussions using photos/graphics/audio/video instead of written words, or using the like/love emoticon to express the relevance to them for different topics.

Ask regular, topical and open questions to prompt discussion from members

This is especially important for online communities. Moderators of successful online communities are constantly asking open-ended questions on a daily basis in order to keep the group active and visible on people’s feeds.

Inconsistently managed communities can easily become buried on people’s timelines, so posting daily doesn’t just engage with your existing members, it can also help your community grow to reach new people!

Using Social Media does have its pros:

• It’s easy for people to access
• Social media has a potentially massive reach
• It’s already deeply integrated into people’s lives

However, like everything, there are also some downsides:

• You’re at the mercy of content algorithms of which you have little control over
• It’s a lot of effort and hard work to maintain an active social presence across multiple platforms – it can be a full-time job in many cases.

By posting regular discussion prompts, you’ll stay on the right side of the algorithms and ensure your community stays active, even if you’re not online 24/7.

Most Social Media platforms have a handy ‘scheduling tool’ that can save time by scheduling these in advance!

Consider the culture of your community

All online platforms have their own culture, then there are sub-cultures within each of the platforms too. Within most well-run online community, each group has its own culture, terminology, rules and structure.

Michelle Parry-Slater* suggests that social learning only works if there is the trust and culture of connection. People will need to feel they can seek out peer support and information.

This trust may require time to develop, as well as building the culture of sharing as the norm. As a community facilitator or participant you can:

• Exhibit humility, vulnerability and good will. You may know a lot about your subject, but you probably don’t know everything. Check in about what different groups in your community need; acknowledge that they have valuable information and make contributions.
• Ask questions with genuine curiosity. Everyone has a story to tell. Hearing others’ stories helps everyone understand how their experiences shape them.
• Take time. Start conversations, raise discussion points, share “just for fun” posts as well as more serious topics to get the community to know one another
• Share information that helps newcomers be successful in your community.  communication builds trust, so post regularly to keep the community engaged.
• Gather input intentionally. This may require outreach to specific community members, to provide information on topics that may not be your forte.**

Building success

In summary, we can all learn and benefit from each other in a community of practice. It takes trust, and the building of a positive community.

At Panda Education, we have launched a community of practice for practitioners in post-16 Panda Education Network. You can find us on Facebook.

Please apply if you are interested in joining an participate in sharing good practice, taking part in discussions and helping us build a network of professional practice for tutors, trainers and assessors working in Apprenticeships, FE and ACL.

 References

* Michelle Parry-Slater (2021), The Learning and Development Handbook, p127-139

** Joyce Hoelting (Reviewed 2017) https://extension.umn.edu/vital-connections/building-trust-communities