Communities of practice

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(2006) defines a community of practice as “a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”. Those people are engaged in a process of collective learning and in a shared domain of human endeavor. There are three characteristics of a community of practice:
Domain: It refers to the identity defined for the commitment for learning for each other and also to the collective competence and share competence that people have.
Community: it refers to the interaction of the members of the group that way of sharing information and building relationships in order to learn together.
Practice: it refers to the shared practice for building the community own repertoire of resources according to the experiences, stories and tools they have used.
For professional development, community of practice is really useful given that it allows teachers to develop pedagogical discussions in order to solve problems in the classroom or in the educational environment, it also allows share experiences for having different suggestions from others in order to develop better resources, provide and receive meaningful feedback, adapt or adopt other’s successful methodologies, resources, activities or approaches. Besides, sharing experiences teachers have the possibility to be innovative by implementing different resources or technological tools.
For language learning, I consider that the most important issue is that it is possible to increase knowledge challenges, organize educational experiences and connect those experiences with the actual practice outside the classroom and out of the school which allows lifelong learning and social learning.