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Communities of Practice
A Community of Practice (CoP) is made up of a group of people with shared interests who engage in a process of collective learning. The Center for Health Care in Schools uses this model in different projects to to integrate and prioritize strategies ranging from targeted interventions to broader prevention efforts with the goal of tailoring student well being solutions to the unique context of each school & district.
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
Etienne Wenger
Communities of Practice: A Brief Introduction
Practice is developed through different possible activities including:
- problem solving
- request for information
- seeking experience
- discussing developments
- mapping knowledge and identifying gaps
CoPs can come in many different shapes and sizes. For the Stakeholder Learning Community, we support a small but mighty 15-20 local organizations passionate about innovating DC's school behavioral health. On the other hand, our DC School Behavioral Health Community of Practice includes over 300 schools, as well as many additional partners including community-based organizations, students, and families. There are many different kinds of communities, but it's when there is a specific domain, community, and a type of practice that it becomes a CoP.
Our Work
- The DC School Behavioral Health Community of Practice
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We are partnering with District of Columbia Department of Behavioral Health to organize and facilitate the DC School Behavioral Health Community of Practice (DC CoP). The DC CoP provides leadership, technical assistance, and professional development to support DC’s School Behavioral Health Expansion Initiative. The DC CoP aims to develop highly-effective and sustainable partnerships between schools, community-based organizations, behavioral health service providers, youth and families, and other relevant stakeholders within the community. These partnerships will support the implementation of comprehensive school behavioral systems designed to increase access to behavioral health services and support the emotional well-being of students in DC.
- Stakeholder Learning Community
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We are partnered with the Bainum Family Foundation to support a District-wide Stakeholder Learning Community (SLC) composed of 15+local school behavioral health stakeholders to advance a comprehensive school behavioral health system. The SLC developed a shared, long-term vision for improving child behavioral health in DC and developed a system dynamics model to inform policy-making and program design for comprehensive school behavioral health in DC.