Leadership Challenge #1

LdC  #1

Influential Practitioners (Leadership Challenge): Leading in a COP

Enhancing Action Research and Leadership Possibilities

through the Development of your Collaborative Skills

Module 1                                                                    Name: James D. Lett

The process below relates to the following Leadership Provocative Question(s): 

How are groups and communities of practice (CoPs) different?  How are they alike?  So what?  What now? 

Groups and CoPs are comprised of people who have frequent contact, consistent interaction, collective influence, a shared feeling of friendship and support, and a commitment to work together to achieve common goals.

Communities of Practice are not simply a collection of individuals discussing various topics or participating in a myriad of activities. PoPs are built upon competent membership. There are three components of competent membership:

1. Mutuality of Engagement - the ability to build relationships based upon engagement with members and reciprocating actions. Membership is based upon social status, organizational membership, or personal relationships with people. Identity is established through participation.
2. Joint Enterprise - the ability to adequately grasp the enterprise, take responsibility for it, and participate in the negotiation of the community's continued pursuit. 
3. Shared Repertoire - refers to routines, words, tools, words, experiences, tips, stories, and ideas that have been adopted during the communities existence. 

a. Preparing for an on-line Conversation

Consider the provocative question(s) above; please record quotes/ideas from the Wenger text that are appropriate in responding to the provocative question(s) posed in this module. These quotes/ideas will help you participate in a scholarly and collegial on-line conversation during the module. Also record illustrative stories or instances from your professional practice appropriate for responding to the provocative question(s). Typically, you should provide six (6) quotes/ideas from Wenger and two (2) applications/instances from your workplace setting. Write them here. 

Quote/ideas from the book; applications/instances from your workplace setting	Page number
Membership is not just a matter of social category, declaring allegiance, belonging to an organization, having a title, or having personal relations with some people.	74
Their practice supports a communal memory that allows individuals to do their work without needing to know everything.	46
Makes the job habitable by creating an atmosphere in which the monotonous and meaningless aspects of the job are woven into the rituals, customer, stories, events, dramas, and rhythms of community life.	46
Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued facts, fixing machines, writing poetry, being convivial, growing up as a boy or a girl, and so forth.	4
Communities of practice are an integral part of our daily lives. They are so informal and so pervasive that they rarely come into explicit focus, but for the same reasons they are also quit familiar.	7
(Implications for what it takes to understand and support learning) For organizations, it means that learning is an issue of sustaining the interconnected communities of practice through which an organization knows what it knows and thus becomes effective and valuable as an organization	8
Frequently, our student services are often unsure of their responses to students when being asked general advising related questions.
Many procedures are communicated through word of mouth, which places a great deal of pressure on staff members to know everything.

b. Holding an on-line Conversation

After participating/viewing the “fishbowl” conversation record notes here (below) about your responses to your peers or new thoughts based on their postings.  Be certain your notes here are comprehensive, as were your responses to peers. (If you participate as a “fish,” in the fishbowl your notes, which should be entered below, can be much more succinct.)

(This space expands to accommodate your writing.)

c. Determining your Leadership Challenge

Pt. 1: Based on your own quotes/ideas from Wenger, your workplace experiences, and new insights you developed as you reflected on your peers’ work, what behavior do you want to experiment with/try out for your leadership challenge in the next few days?

I want attempt to improve our organizational knowledge by offering student services information sessions during our Friday meetings.

Implement your leadership challenge over the next week.

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(Complete in Module 2)

Pt. 2: What did you end up doing for your leadership challenge?

(Write one sentence.)

d. Assessing and Reflecting on your Leadership Challenge

How did your change in behavior affect others in your Community of Practice? Tell the story of what happened.

(Be brief.  Write 2-4 sentences.)

Reflect on your experience with the Leadership Challenge for this module. 

(Be verbose.  Write 2-3 paragraphs.)

Some prompts to help the juices flow, but it is not mandatory that you use any/all of these:

·            Was your behavioral change supported by CoP theory? Explain.

·            Was this change really a challenge for you? Why?  (cont. next page)

·            Did you “Lean In” for this challenge? How far? Could you have leaned further? If so, why did you hold back?

·            Did your behavioral change trigger changes in response from others? Was it a positive or a negative response? Why do you think this is so?

·            What do you think would happen if you sustained this behavioral change over time? Why do you think this is so?

·            What would Wenger say?