Do we know a community of practice when we see one?

Abstract

This paper comments on strengths and weaknesses of the papers on communities of practice in this special issue of Technology, Pedagogy and Education. First it discusses the character of communities of practice and the question of whether schools are environments that are conducive to the development of teacher communities of practice. It then argues that the number of external inputs in reflection in teacher education in general and more specifically in communities of practice is too limited. A way to improve this input might be by fruitfully combining the concepts ‘community of practice’ and ‘learning community’ and by adding a stronger focus on theories of teaching. Developments in teacher education could profit from a stronger combination of pedagogy and technology driven approaches. With regard to research methods, future research needs mixed methods and quasi‐experiments applied in a rigorous way to investigate conditions for and effects of communities of practice and learning.