We’re just back from a week in Prague helping to train school councils link teachers from schools across the Czech Republic. The words “Žákovské parlamenty” are very important to us now :)
We worked with a GREAT organisation called CEDU who support school councils over there. Having showed Kamila and Tomas from CEDU school councils from around London a couple of years ago, it was lovely to do the return trip.
CEDU have been supporting a number of schools across the Czech Republic to set up and maintain effective school councils.
They had put on a three day course for teachers from 13 schools across the whole country. Three teachers came from each school, including a head teacher – great commitment from the staff. Our contribution was to give a one-hour presentation on how school councils work in the UK, and to deliver a couple of training sessions for the 40ish teachers (number not age).
Things I learnt in Prague:
- The obstacles that school councils face in the Czech Republic are remarkably similar to the ones that we face in the UK.
- Training through a translator is difficult but a good challenge.
- Prague is an amazing city and rabbit hearts taste really good.
- Jackets from Top Man don’t keep you warm in -20 degrees temperatures.
- If a teacher offers you a green drink with cream on the top in a Czech bar, don’t drink it.
Things we did:
Anyway, we started the trip with a visit to a local primary and secondary school called Táborská. After a lovely tour of the school (which you can see here, we sat in on a school council meeting which was translated brilliantly by one of the students, Max. Their school councils is called ‘3 Oko’ which means ‘Third Eye’.
The school council were talking about having a bigger role in supporting learning for younger students and working closely with teachers. It was a really useful start to see a school council meeting.
The next day was the first day of the conference. We had the amazing Honza as our official translator for the training – he was quick, concise and knew his stuff on participation. The whole week was a lot easier because of Honza – thanks!
After some warm up exercises, and three of the teacher participants turning up in traditional Moravian dress (plus shots of slivovitz for everyone!), Tomas gave an update on the programme. We then gave a speech (through Honza) on school councils in the UK. You can see this below; though the fonts are a bit messed up.
To give us a flavour of some of the student voice work they’ve been doing, the teachers each gave a short presentation on what their students have been up to. Here’s one of the presentations (you can see a few more here):
The next day we delivered two workshops to the teachers aimed at helping them to overcome some of the difficulties they were having with their school councils. Asher sensibly suggested that the workshops should be in Czech so that the teachers could share ideas, with Honza translating things back to us. This worked out well, and there was a sigh of relief from the teachers when they didn’t have to hear everything in English.
It was a really interesting day, and many of the teachers had made really good progress. We helped them to support one another, and chipped in with our own advice too. I found it difficult not to be able to support the teachers once they were in small groups though, due to the language barrier – often that’s when you can go into more detail and give some tailored support. We did out best though, and the teachers seemed to get a lot out of it.
After a lovely end-of course celebration, and some exciting discussions about future collaboration, our trip to Prague came to an end. I also did a short interview on Prague radio. If you can’t speak Czech, it’s probably not worth clicking :)
And if you’re interested, here’s the programme that we ran: involver session outline – Prague Feb 2012
So we’d like to say a big thank you to the CEDU team: Tomas, Kamila, Karel, Filip, Honza, Jaroslav and Eliska. You were amazing hosts and we’re very grateful. A massive thank you to all the teachers we worked with too!