On Monday, the West Wind Education Policy team – including our colleague who telecommutes from 2 hours away – gathered in the West Wind offices for a staff retreat. We do this twice yearly and spend one to two days working together side-by-side. During this retreat we spent the first part of our day focused on our social media strategy for ourselves and our clients and partners. During the afternoon we spent some time discussing how we physically work together and how we could best use our space and the tools we have to make our work stronger and grow our relationships.
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about how our use of online social media is continuously changing the way we work at West Wind. We often talk about communities of practice with our clients and partners as they try new initiatives and set up communities around specific policy questions or programs. We always emphasize the fact that these aim to be communities where members come to share, learn, ask questions, and form professional networks. In our work we are all members of several of these communities and engage in each in different ways.
This retreat reinforced for me that we at West Wind are a community of practice – that may sound like a simple statement, but it is more than just a phrase. The way we work together side-by-side, online, over the phone, or on email creates a space where collaboration can happen continuously. The time we spend in retreats, thinking about how we work as a team, has offered us the opportunity to build trust and camaraderie with each other. We can offer constructive criticism to each other without fear because we all know that we are invested in shared work – the work to make strong educational opportunities available to every student. Retreats do not have to last several days or take place in-person, but the time to hash out how a community works together is worth spending. To grow as a team, we are working as a team – and that is a key to any community of practice!