Literacy for equitable interprofessional learning: implementation protocol for an online community of practice for Irish teachers and speech and language therapists

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are often used to enhance professional learning and support capacity for change. While they are increasingly popular in both health and education, more needs to be done to understand how the CoPs can be used to support equitable, interprofessional collaboration between these allied disciplines. This paper presents a novel protocol that describes the implementation and evaluation procedures of an online CoP for primary school teachers and speech and language therapists (SLTs) that focuses on effective literacy instruction. Literacy is an equitable domain of shared practice not previously explored in the Irish context. This protocol leveraged two distinct yet converging Implementation Science frameworks to inform the design and evaluation of the proposed interprofessional CoP. These frameworks provide a comprehensive blueprint for designing, executing and evaluating both the process and outcomes of the CoP.