Running Head: VOLUNTARY OR MANDATORY? TEACHER CoPs
Voluntary or Mandatory? A Discussion of Participation Structure for
Teacher Communities of Practice
Khanh Bui
July 25, 2014
California State University, East Bay
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VOLUNTARY OR MANDATORY? TEACHER CoPs
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Abstract
An important decision for any school that intends to establish a community of practice (CoP) for
its teachers, either face-to-face or virtual, is whether or not to make participation mandatory or
voluntary. This paper discusses the different definitions and goals of the term CoP as it relates to
participation structure, as well as the benefits and challenges of each approach. To the extent that
CoPs can actually be externally managed, mandatory participation is justified when there are
enough resources and strong external leadership that can mitigate the possible disengagement of
forced attendance. Voluntary participation can result in greater innovation due to greater trust
and comradery, and can require fewer resources on the part of the school organization. However,
voluntary CoPs also risk becoming insular and uninviting to new ideas and members. In the end,
evidence suggests that the initial participation structure, voluntary or mandatory, may not be as
important to the overall outcomes of a CoP as the eventual engagement of its members.
VOLUNTARY OR MANDATORY? TEACHER CoPs
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Introduction
Building communities of practice (CoPs) among teachers has become an increasingly
popular notion in school reform and improvement over the past two decades (Blankenship and
Ruona, 2007). As more district and school administrators consider implementing a CoP in their
workplaces, especially given the current ease and flexibility of using online platforms for the
purpose, an important initial decision is whether to make participation voluntary or compulsory
for teachers. What positive and negative contributions does participation structure make to the
effect of CoP on teacher professional development? This paper begins with a brief discussion of
the two main interpretations of the term CoP, and how these approaches relate to participation
structure. It then discusses evidence of the consequences of voluntary and mandatory
involvement in CoPs. The decision may not be as important to overall teacher outcomes as you
might think; research suggests that there are factors that contribute far more to the success of a
CoP, and ultimately teacher and student outcomes.
Defining “Community of Practice”: Organizational Studies vs.
Knowledge Management Interpretations
As Murillo (2011) and Schwen and Hara (2003) comprehensively explain, the term
“community of practice” means different things to different people. It is generally agreed that a
CoP is a group of people with similar job responsibilities, interests and goals that meet in order
to solve problems and form best practices with each other (Cambridge, Kaplan, and Suter, 2005).
However, there grew to be several different interpretations and branches from the original
conception (Murillo, 2011). These interpretations can be placed into two distinct groups in
relation to how they view participation structure – organizational studies and knowledge
management (Murillo, 2011).
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Organizational Studies Interpretation. Wenger (as cited in Schwen & Hara, 2003)
originally introduced the phrase “community of practice.” It was used as a descriptive term for
an observed behavior of informal groups of workers with similar goals and routine challenges
that met to construct practical knowledge together. This interpretation of CoPs as organic
structures that emerge on their own to address common problems is the basis for the
organizational studies perspective. For example, Orr (as cited in Murillo, 2011) describes a group
of machine technicians that talked every day at breakfast in order to share stories about their field
experiences and help each other develop best practices. CoPs such as these meet completely
voluntarily, outside of management control, and without top-down leadership related to defining
the topics of discussion, results, or deliverables. Group members define what they should
accomplish and form a collective identity among themselves alone (Riddle, 2003). From this
perspective, voluntary involvement is an essential element of CoPs (Blankenship & Ruona,
2007); to make participation mandatory would be to impose managerial will, which would
remove the necessary informal nature and mutual engagement of the group. This lack of
predetermined organization, goals and results is the main difference between the organization
studies and the knowledge management interpretations of CoPs.
Knowledge Management Interpretation. When business practitioners and researchers
read ethnographies that described the benefits of naturally emergent CoPs, they realized the
advantages of aiming to strategically identify, launch and foster CoPs as a tool for knowledge
management (Murillo, 2011). If organizations, like schools, could create communities of practice
for its staff, then they could leverage the knowledge gained within the communities and build
upon it to meet strategic goals, such as increasing measurable student achievement. In this
manner, the working definition of CoPs changed to a structure that could be managed, whose
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initiatives and deliverables could be set and strategically supported by top-down leadership, and
whose membership could be dictated (Murillo, 2011; Blankenship & Ruona, 2007). From this
conception of CoP is born other related terms that are often used by school administrators to
mean the same thing as CoP, but can have different implications for participation structure:
professional learning community, community of knowledge, and network of practice, among
others (Murillo, 2011; Blankenship & Ruona, 2007).
Need for Common Typology. The existence of overlapping terms, open definitions, and
conflicting conceptions related to CoPs have caused researchers such as Dube, Bourhis, and
Jacob (2006) to call for a common typology of CoPs to aid in interpreting research studies and
their results. One of the defining characteristcs of CoPs and virtual CoPs that Dube, et al. (2006)
suggest is where a particular CoP lies on the spectrum of compulsory to completely voluntary
(the authors note that in between these two extremes are situations where workers feel social or
managerial pressure to participate without an explicit mandate). In the decades of research
before the call for a common typology and despite the conflicting definitions of CoP, many
research papers neglected to mention the structural elements of the CoPs they studied, including
their participation structure (Dube, et al., 2006; Fulton, Doerr, and Britton, 2010). This makes it
difficult for practitioners to understand the benefits and challenges of mandatory and voluntary
involvement. The remainder of this paper discusses what can be gleaned from existing research
in spite of a lack of a common definition of CoP or adequate categorization of its structural
elements in many studies.
Mandatory Participation: Benefits and Challenges
The benefits of mandatory participation in a school CoP are straightforward. It is
assumed that the CoP is introduced or identified because there are important outcomes that all of
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the staff must be involved with in order to reach success. Thus, it would make sense to force
participation in order to ensure every staff member’s contribution. As one interviewee in a
WestEd published study put it, to do otherwise would be to establish “collaboration without a
formula “(Fulton, et al., 2010, p.40). Further, there is no risk of staff members feeling
marginalized later on when a voluntary CoP begins to produce results and is recognized or
receives special support by leadership. In this sense, mandatory participation can help to create a
more egalitarian atmosphere in the organization as a whole.
Mandatory participation does not equate to individual staff engagement, however
(Riddle, 2003), and it does not guarantee progress towards any top-down established goals or
objectives (Murillo, 2011). In fact, there is evidence that once CoPs are made mandatory,
innovation decreases and some members form subgroups that meet outside of management sight
due to the perceived need for independence or resistance to dictated responsibilities (Murillo,
2011). By mandating participation, then, a school may be removing what made the CoP
attractive to members that would have otherwise been voluntary and its most enthusiastic
contributors.
Because there will inevitably be resistant or resentful members in a mandatory CoP,
strong leadership is needed to show these members the mutual benefits of engaged participation.
Blankenship and Ruona (2007) found that mandatory CoPs (by their definition, these are called
professional learning communities) required more intense and more skilled external leadership to
be successful. This finding is supported by Bourhis, Dube and Jacob (2005), who categorized
mandatory participation as a challenge to the success of virtual CoPs and found effective external
leadership important in mitigating the effect. In other words, if a school decides on mandating
participation, it must be ready to invest significant time and resources into leading the CoP; it is
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not enough to create a common meeting time within contract hours or an online collaboration
platform (both of which may already be significant expenditures) and expect results. If there are
not enough resources or inadequate leadership skill to establish a mandated CoP, positive results
for the school can still be achieved by allowing a voluntary CoP arise, or nurturing an existing
voluntary CoP to greater success.
Voluntary Participation: Benefits and Challenges
As stated above, voluntary CoPs require less effort and resources on the part of school
administration. They offer an avenue for teacher professional development that is completely
self-determined, independent of administration control, and flexible – thus, they also can be
highly motivating (Riddle, 2003). Teachers in voluntary virtual CoPs report that they appreciate
being able to participate only in the topics that they care about at the time, for as much time as
they want, rather than sitting through an entire mandatory staff meeting that does not serve their
immediate needs due to the competing needs of others (Riddle, 2003). A disinterest or animosity
towards mandated professional development is not the same as disinterest in professional growth
(Riddle, 2003); allowing a voluntary CoP to thrive at school without administrative intervention
may be an alternative way to engage teachers who “tune out” or do not gain any benefit from
mandated meeting time.
Voluntary CoPs can also have an easier time escaping what Schwen and Hara (2003)
describe as the possible destructive consequences of CoPs. They state that negative cultural
elements in an organization, such as hyper-competitiveness, hording of information, and
unproductive power structures are hard to break when all of the staff, willing or unwilling, are
placed in a CoP. If the CoP develops naturally, trust is easier to form between members, which
facilitates the breaking of ineffective habits. Riddle (2003) notes that teachers in negative
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working environments turned to voluntary CoPs to escape the isolation and find solutions with
like-minded individuals. Leadership develops more organically, and is not as vulnerable to the
politics of the whole organization (Dube, et al., 2006). It follows that those same teachers would
feel that mandatory involvement by all teachers in the negative environment would have been
detrimental to their exploration of solutions and new resources. The automatically shared vision,
and possibly the self-selection of amenable personalities in voluntary CoPs, then, can lead to
higher levels of productivity and innovation (Murillo, 2011).
The challenges to voluntary participation in CoPs revolve around issues of control,
uneven contribution, and recognition. Obviously, if the administration does not control who is
involved in the CoP, it also has no control over who receives, creates, or shares the knowledge
gained there. In completely voluntary situations, members can come and go as they choose, and
thus cannot be relied upon to attend a set number of meetings or contribute to any conversations
even if present. It would be very difficult implement successful solutions to an identified schoolwide problem if the primary tool for getting there was voluntary. Hower (2014) states that if an
organization wants to achieve a specific goal, a mandatory task team may be more appropriate
than a CoP; if the purpose of the group is to share practices and discuss solutions to day-to-day
issues, a voluntary CoP is best.
Patterns of individual contribution to a CoP are hard to change in voluntary situations. Inperson teams generally see the majority of members contribute a moderate amount, and a few
outliers contribute a lot or very little (Spencer, 2012). This would be the expected result of a
voluntary face-to-face school CoP, as there is no mandate for the low-contributors to do more.
Participation in voluntary online forums follows a different and predictable pattern of very
uneven contribution from individual members, whether or not the members feel they are part of a
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community, as described by Spencer (2012). Typically, a very few participants contribute the
lion’s share of the worthwhile work in a forum, while the vast majority only contribute a little
bit, perhaps on one or two occasions. Voluntary virtual CoPs would likely hold to the same
pattern, and Spencer (2012) notes that even incentives do not affect the observed participation
curve in the long run. This would be a source of concern for school leaders who intended the
CoP to foster a high level of collaboration for all interested members.
Lastly, recognizing a voluntary CoP within the school may lead to negative feelings for
those who do not participate for any number of reasons. The people who are left out of the CoP
may be less willing to adopt the solutions developed there, or may resent learning about
promising practices later than others in the same department or grade level. A voluntary CoP
runs the risk of becoming insular and a clique that isolates others.
In the End, Initial Participation is Less Important than Eventual Engagement
Whatever decision is made about the participation structure of its CoP -- whether the
decision is due to available resources, leadership knowledge and ability, the existing cultural
environment, or the goals and objectives to be achieved – administrators should keep one thing
in mind. After extensive and separate literature reviews, it has been found that initial
participation structure is less important to the success of a school CoP than eventual teacher
engagement (Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, and Fung, 2007; Afolabi, 2013; Cambridge, et al.,
2005). Afolabi compared the retention rates of teachers who participated in voluntary and
mandatory CoPs, and found no significant difference between the two groups; teachers who were
not offered a chance to participate in a CoP at all were significantly more likely to leave the
profession.
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Teachers who enthusiastically volunteer for a CoP can later discover that they are
unwilling to deeply examine and change their practices, and make no meaningful progress. A
forced participant, on the other hand, can gain tremendous personal growth from a CoP if they
find a way to engage at some point in the process (Timperley, et al., 2007). This in itself may tip
the scale towards a mandatory participation structure if resources and leadership are at all
available to the support the CoP effort. If not, a voluntary CoP will still reap benefits in teacher
practice that would not occur with other mandatory professional development practices.
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