On Wednesday 6 February, the first meeting of quality counsellors network took place at the SIAE. It was attended by 19 representatives of organisations with active quality counsellor.
The key joint activity in the quality counsellors network for 2018, which the counsellors implemented under the expert guidance of the SIAE, was focused on the teachers and their role in assessment and development of quality of their work. Quality counsellors prepared content descriptions for already established quality assessment model at teacher level in their organisations. Their analyses or status reports were reviewed and redacted by SIAE. Based on this, the counsellors prepared a final version of the report for their organisation. At the end of the year, they met in a virtual classroom to vote on three common minimum standards for quality assessment of the teachers work.
This year, the counsellors will continue with their joint professional activity, mainly to attempt to introduce or/and upgrade the selected common minimum standards in their organisations. They will define concrete activities for their organisations to reach the following objectives:
- to establish or upgrade a regular system of assessment of the quality of support provided to the participants by the teachers,
- to develop suitable approaches and ways, so that the teachers can start systematically self-assess the quality of their work,
- to establish or upgrade a regular system of assessment of the participant’s satisfaction with various aspects of the teacher’s work.
At the further training in February, the counsellors already performed initial considerations regarding the planning of more concrete activities in 2019. For that, the participation of teachers is crucial, not only in planning the assessment and implementation, but also in the evaluation of achieved results.
In the afternoon session, we were joined by Dr Mateja Brejc from the National School of Leadership in Education. She introduced a national project to establish, supplement, and test a model to identify and ensure quality in the area of education, and explained the starting points to place adult education into a common framework. The point of the improvements that they are trying to achieve with the establishment of a common model to identify and ensure quality, is to find out what the teachers and heads of schools need, in order to improve teaching and guidance.
Before the day ended, the counsellors also learned about the proposal for new promotional activity in 2019. As part of the Lifelong Learning Week, we are planning a joint campaign called We all create quality, in which organisations with quality counsellors and also other organisations will participate. The activity will be coordinated by the SIAE.
Further training in February has taken place as part of an European Social Fund project: Strengthening the competences of professionals in the field of managing innovative educational institutions 2018–2022. The autumn training for quality counsellors is planned for October.
Petra Šmalcelj (petra.smalcelj@acs.si), SIAE
