The GHFP’s HCE pilot in a school in La Tebaida, Colombia, is witnessing transformative experiences in their students. Mentoring sessions provide a safe space for students to share their lives in ways they have seldom done before. Students feel deeply touched by the care shown by the pastoral team; they feel their lives matter and their well-being is respected.
The teaching team engage in various ongoing professional learning and development activities, to support them to work together in a concerted way. These activities include:
- Sharing their respective learning biographies as a basis for each teacher to articulate their personal ‘theorisation’ of learning and approaches to teaching. This sharing in turn helps bring teachers closer as their appreciation of each other’s narrative and life histories deepens.
- Forming mentoring partnership pairings. Pairs observe and provide feedback to each other on activity design, classroom teaching, and interaction with students.
- Weekly meetings dedicated to reading HCE theories together and discussing how the key philosophical ideas might be relevant and applied to the school’s situation, especially in terms of how teachers relate to students. This weekly meeting is also a social time when the team share stories of the week over coffee. The message is clear: professional development is fun, enlivening and relaxing.