The School and the Teacher

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn ~ John Cotton Dana

The Role of the Teacher and the School ?

Peter Henschel
http://www.linezine.com/6.2/articles/phuwnes.htm

Here are three reasons why you should consider building community into your overall learning strategy:

* Approximately 70 percent of what an employee needs to know to do his or her job successfully is learned outside of formal training, according to Peter Henschel's article "Understanding and Winning the Never-Ending Search for Talent: The Manager’s Core Work in the New Economy." Therefore, communities extend learning by creating a structure in which people can learn from informal interactions.

* Tacit knowledge, which is informal knowledge about how things really get done, is extremely difficult to capture, codify, and deliver through discrete learning objects and traditional training programs. Communities are a way to elicit and share practical know-how that would otherwise remain untapped.

* Creating and structuring opportunities for people to network, communicate, mentor, and learn from each other can help capture, formalize, and diffuse tacit knowledge. Communities become a boundaryless container for knowledge and relationships that can be used to increase individual effectiveness and a company’s overall competitive advantage.

Indeed, for most learning professionals, the question isn’t whether building communities will deliver value to the organization, but rather what kind of community does it need and what steps does the company need to take to build one.