Quality counsellors continued working during the epidemic on the joint activity of the counsellors’ network (in Slovenian) in 2020 – they are collecting good stories from adult education teachers on how they are evaluating and developing the quality of their work. Counsellors are also active in numerous other activities for the assessment and development of quality that are carried out in their organisations during the year.
Just as we did for other networks in adult education, we published Instructions and professional recommendations for quality counsellors’ work (in Slovenian) for the period during the COVID-19 epidemic. We recommended counsellors should try to use the time when many of their teachers are not taking part in the teaching of adults due to the suspension of the regular educational process to engage them in this year’s joint activity, i.e. invite them and guide them in the preparation of their good stories on the theme of quality.
Communication between the national coordination of the network at the SIAE and the quality counsellors proceeded without interruption in the online classroom (in Slovenian) of the network, via e-mail and over the telephone during the whole period.
During the third week of distance work, we invited counsellors in the online classroom to participate in joint video call via the Microsoft Teams app. We created a new closed group in the app and prepared instructions for participation to help quality counsellors to register. We briefly discussed the aspects of tackling the new methods of work during the epidemic: how their organisation is facing the situation, how they organise their work, how they tackle challenges of providing distance adult education, how other activities are performed (guidance activity, study circles, project learning of young adults, etc.), but of course, most time of the e-meeting was devoted to talking about the progress of their activities in the area of adult education quality evaluation and development.
The responses from quality counsellors in both e-meetings were very positive so we bid goodbye to one another with a promise to meet again via e-meeting and check the progress of activities during this year’s joint network activity.
Quickly after e-meetings we received the first stories written by teachers on how they assure quality of their work (within the study group or when working with individual learners). The first three invited teachers mustered up the courage, deliberated on the issue and wrote down their authentic and interesting views on a teacher’s work. When quality counsellors will manage to collect all of these valuable materials, the SIAE will publish the stories.
Jasmina Orešnik Cunja (jasmina.oresnik.cunja@acs.si), SIAE
