In the best classrooms, learning should be a symbiosis between the students and the teacher(s). That is how I would describe a “learning community.”
Instead of teachers’ mostly presenting material or narrowing the field of inquiry, they should provide the initial impetus for the investigation, helpful assists during the discussions/investigations, and encourage student curiosity by encouraging what might seem to be tangential questions (as long as they spring from the class discussion/reading/material or can be framed in such a way as to do so).
Doing so effectively requires a teacher to give up traditional control of the content and change to a control of the process. In the most effective rooms, such control will be subtle and nudging, relying to a minimal extent on the “because I’m the teacher” resort to force. Such an approach can be fraught because good questions, if allowed to veer from narrowly defined “content,” will eventually result in some a teacher cannot answer or to which her initial response will be either unhelpful or wrong. Teachers need to embrace such mistakes as learning opportunities both for themselves, but more important, for their students. No-one can always be right (except in solving problems that have already been solved); “adaptive learning” thus requires adapting to changing and potentially unforeseen circumstances.
There is little need for solving problems that have already been solved.