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The paper describes McMaster University’s first-year initiative, engaging faculty, staff, and students through four communities: Teaching with Technology, Teaching Professors, Pedagogy, and First Year Instructors. It explains how safe, supportive forums encourage new ideas and risk-taking, leading to individual and collective learning. 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The focus of this paper is to describe the first-year experience of a community of practice initiative at McMaster University that was designed to engage groups of faculty, staff, and students to share ideas andfoster learning. Four communities were initiated: Teaching with Technology, Teaching Professors, Pedagogy, and First Year Instructors, all of which provided a forum of safety and support, encouraging new ideas and risk taking that in turn contributed to individual and collective learning. Though in its early days, we consider communities of practice an innovative way to regenerate current learning and surface teaching practices that can build dynamic academic communities to foster faculty and staff development. Communities of practice have enabled us to reach beyondformal structures (e.g., classrooms) to create connections amongst people from different disciplinary boundaries that generate learning andfoster development.  \nIntroduction  \nCommunities of practice are becoming more  \nwidespread within higher education. According to Wenger (2006) their success depends upon the intersecting goals and interests of individuals and institutions. While the models of learning that support communities of practice have been shown to facilitate social engagement and collaborative approaches to learning, there is little re-  \nsearch that specifically explores how these social learning networks enhance faculty development. The focus of this paper is to describe the communities of practice initiative at McMaster University that was designed to engage groups of faculty, staff, and students to share ideas and foster learning through professional development (i.e. , activities that improve and increase knowledge) . We  \nbegin with a description of the model of communities of practice, integrating an introduction to concepts related to situated learning theory that has guided the McMaster University experience, and then provide supporting evidence for how our community of practice model supports faculty development. We conclude with a discussion of our goal of evolving a sustainable set of communities of practice for individuals who have a passion for teaching and learning in higher education.  \nUsing a Community of Practice Lens  \nCommunities of practice, also referred to as ‘learning networks,’ are formed by groups of people who share a concern, set of problems, or a passion about a topic and strive to engage in a process of collective learning (Wenger, 2006; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002) . Essentially communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion and want to improve their practice by interacting regularly with others. A central aspect of a community of practice is that learning can be the reason for the community or an incidental outcome of the interactions of the members within the community (Wenger, 2006) . The term community of practice has its roots in a model of learning based on apprenticeship, whereby members learn through a process of acculturation into a community, gradually assuming increased roles and responsibilities within the socio-cultural practices of a community (Chapman, 2008) . The basis of communities of practice within this model of learning serves to distinguish them from simply being a group with a common interest.  \nCommunities of practice can exist in numerous settings, ranging from educational institutions to corporations. Regardless of the setting, they are based on three structural characteristics: (1) The domain is the common ground, which provides a sense of identity and pur","cbCaihzX4WqZDqzm","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaihzX4WqZDqzm","pdf",593146,"English","# Introduction\n# Using a Community of Practice Lens\n## Structural characteristics\n## Identity construction and situated learning\n## Sustaining communities of practice","[{\"question\":\"What is the paper’s main purpose?\",\"answer\":\"To describe McMaster University’s first-year communities of practice initiative and explain how it supports faculty development through professional learning.\"},{\"question\":\"Which communities of practice were initiated at McMaster University?\",\"answer\":\"Teaching with Technology, Teaching Professors, Pedagogy, and First Year Instructors.\"},{\"question\":\"How do communities of practice support learning beyond traditional classroom structures?\",\"answer\":\"They create connections across disciplinary boundaries and enable shared learning through regular interaction, discussion, and collective knowledge-building.\"}]","Using Communities of Practice to Foster Faculty Development in Higher Education | PDF",1792087312,15]