“You know what community is,” Doops said, his voice rising with impatience. “It’s a bunch of folks getting along for some reason. Something holds them together. Generally something bad … Nobody needs nobody when they’re happy. But it just happens. We don’t make it. We don’t make community any more than we make souls. It’s created.” — Will D. Campbell, The Glad River

OK, this much I know:

1. Learning takes place better when there is community within the classroom (and sometimes out)

2. Will D. Campbell (and others) say that community can be created

3. Community, it seems to me, is best created when all constituents have a say, when they all feel invested in the process

4. How then can best can I create community? Students are NOT all equally interested/invested in every class. They’re NOT all equally skilled.

5. If — as I’ve been told — one of the best ways to create community is to foster daily dialogue in class, the (unspoken) assumption is that everybody in the class can contribute to the new topics and concepts and skill sets that few (if any) of them yet have in the average class.

6. And yes, I get it. That’s MY problem. To dis-assemble to the material in such a way so that everybody, including the kid who arrives late and sleeps in the back of the room during every stinkin’ class, has something pertinent to offer so that the other kids in the class are engaged.

7. But knowing what the problem/challenge is and morphing the material I know from 40 years experience into that kind of interactive give-and-take, the kind that leaves them with more useable information at the end of class than when they began seems to me to be a VERY tall order. And one that doesn’t necessarily involve technology — but might.

8. I clearly have a long way to go.