Every now and again, I meet some special people who remind me in the most delightful of ways why I have spent the greater part of my life involved in education. Such people somehow manage to take me back to why I chose to go into teaching almost four decades ago rather than try to become the songwriter and musician that I wanted to be when I was young and naive (nothing to do with a dispiriting lack of talent, of course). I returned just a few days ago from the town of Struga on the shores of beautiful Lake Orhid in southern Macedonia, where I attended a weekend event organized by a small band of dedicated Macedonian teachers who call themselves the Friends of Education. They had invited me (and a lovely group of fellow-presenters from across Europe and the USA) to present to a gathering of around 250 teachers and educationists from across Macedonia, and some from beyond.
I have enjoyed many education and technology conferences over the years, but there was something special about this one. It wasn’t a big fancy glittering occasion. Rather, it was a wonderfully convivial, well-organized and informal get-together of people who dedicate their lives to ensuring that young people have the best start they possibly can in their lives. Of the core organizing group of around a dozen people, all but two of them are classroom teachers who, on the Monday after their conference finished, would have been back amongst their students doing the job they love (the remaining two are a professor of education and a journalist, both of whom contribute tremendously to the group).
While they are very much an organic and unified team – a team whose members clearly all love and respect each other immensely – the guiding light amongst them is the wonderful and impressive Marina Vasileva. A teacher (and currently also a PhD candidate) from the capital city, Skopje, Marina is a warm-hearted and inspirational figure leading a group of equally warm-hearted and inspiring people!
I was able to offer the teachers assembled in Struga some thoughts about the past, present and future of the school. Predicting the future is always fraught with difficulty, but I suggested to them that we have to learn from the past if we are to understand the present and attempt to forecast the future. The future in education is one that we must not allow simply to happen – we must, as Alan Kay said all those years ago, invent our own future! I spoke about the fundamental relationship that has always existed at the heart of the school, a relationship that is changing inexorably in this age of pervasive networks and digital technologies, namely the relationship between teacher and learner. However much a teacher wants to, he or she can simply no longer be the fount of all wisdom in the classroom (of course the best teachers have always known that). It is a changing relationship that is already transforming the very concept of the school, and that will continue to reshape education in ways that we cannot possibly know fully as yet.
The learner today is a different creature in so many ways from the past, or at least now has the opportunities and the technological environment to allow themselves to direct their own learning, to grab and gather information and expertise from the surging torrents of knowledge flowing past them moment by moment today.
There are siren voices that say that the teacher’s role is somehow diminished in these changing circumstances. It is nonsense! The teacher’s role is vastly more complex and demanding than it has ever been, one in which the very best teachers know that they are now as much the ‘lead learner’ as the teacher in the classroom.
I flew out of Skopje on Monday with my head full of ideas about the possibility of talking to friends and colleagues from across Scottish education about establishing a Friends of Education Scotland. One of the core aims of this marvellous group in Macedonia is to put the continuing development of pedagogy and practice in these disruptive digital times firmly in the hands of the teachers themselves and to begin to shift teachers away from the dependence on professional development opportunities that have been for too long handed down from on high. We all know that the traditional model of CPD does not work. All teachers have always known that!
Friends of Education Scotland could be set up initially in a small, informal, friendly but purposeful way to attempt to develop a similar strategy in this country, and of course to develop strong links with the prime movers in Macedonia. Our two education systems have much to learn from each other. In time, perhaps our friends in Macedonia will see satellite groups being set up in other countries too. What an enticing prospect!
I will come back to this theme soon, as well as to some other aspects of my time in Struga. I want to share much more of what I learned there.
In the meantime, I would like to say ‘ти благодарам’ (pronounced Vee Blagodaram, meaning ‘thank you’) to all of my new friends in Macedonia. I hope to visit you all again soon.
Confucius wrote:
Confucius, rightly, acclaims reflection as the cardinal route to wisdom. We begin to learn by imitating those who know what we also want to know. We learn even more by trying our new knowledge out in the real world in some sense. But we only truly begin to embed that knowledge within us, we only truly begin to ‘know’, when we set out to cast a critical eye over our practice and we question why we do what we do, how we do it, what works, what does not work, and how can we do better.
Critical self-reflection – taking the time to go back over our own teaching, either from memory, or from notes taken, or increasingly today from a video of our teaching; we do this with the aim of challenging ourselves on what went well or not, and why;
By this she means that writing for ourselves is not merely the recording of what has previously been thought. Rather, the actually process of sitting down to write about your own professional practice will help you to capture highlights (and lowlights), consider thoughts, feelings and values that came to mind either during the practice or as you reflect, and give you the means to draw out issues and ponder them at a level that cannot always be achieved by simple reflection or in discussion with others. A critical aspect of reflective writing is that we are not writing for another authority such as a manager or inspector – it should be a key component of our professional autonomy, although a component that does not preclude sharing our writing with others in any way that we are comfortable with. As Bolton writes:
Columba Leadership
It is a mission that I had the privilege to witness at first hand when I visited one of the schools working with Columba Leadership – 
The central principle of Columba seems to be that it is not for anyone else to tell a young person or a educator what kind of person they should be. Instead, the programme is designed to enable every participant to discover who they are for themselves, to find their own inner worth and their own strength of character, and to then give them the means by which they can begin to express that character and that worth, both for themselves and, more importantly, for others around them. The impressive thing about this is that the actual Columba programme is just 6 days long in terms of the training programme itself! In those 6 days, the young people are given the space, the trust and the mental and emotional tools to discover for themselves the importance of six critical leadership traits: Awareness, Focus, Creativity, Integrity, Perseverance and Service. Of course the young people then use what they have learned about themselves over an extended period of time to put their new-found knowledge, skills and capacities into practice.
I intend to write further and in greater detail of my impressions gained during the ten days I spent in South Africa, but I will leave the last word for the moment to Rosey Seima, who along with a number of other Columba Graduates has founded an organization 
The boxes contained an Acorn BBC B computer, a heavy cathode-ray monitor, a cassette data recorder, a large set of cassette tapes that held the software needed to make this strange assortment of devices useful, and some books. I was soon immersed in all that the computer had to offer. I taught myself to program (badly) in BBC Basic and I was hooked. I read everything I could lay my hands on about this new and burgeoning set of possibilities, initially at the technical rather than pedagogical level. Then I came across a book called 
Mindstorms was the spark that led me on a trail of discovery, on a long and winding path of thinking and experimentation, a path that led me towards more than a few dead ends, that often cut back on itself, but that has always been compelling and encouraging. It is a path I am still on, still hitting occasional dead ends, and still sometimes coming back to places where I have been before in order to take a different route. It is the path that has allowed me to spend the past three and a half decades trying to work out how the digital technologies (which of course have exploded in ways that I simply could not have predicted in that primary classroom in the early ‘Eighties) could revolutionize education. Papert’s book led me to 
and I will have the privilege of listening to Margaret in person for the first time in a few weeks’ time at the 
He also taught me that it isn’t enough simply to use technology to do what we already do a little more efficiently or in a slightly different way – we have to use it as a tool for revolution in teaching and learning:
When I read that phrase ‘conservative and controlling leaders’ from my perspective as an educator, I look around the world of formal education and all I see is a solid phalanx of politicians and business people and other social ‘leaders’ who are undeniably conservative whatever their political affiliations. I find it hard to ascribe truly radical views on education really to any of our political, economic or social leaders today. Whether from Right, Left or Centre, whether socially conservative or liberal, whether Green or Climate-Change-Denier, from all across the ideological continuum, there are really very few if any in power who have ever had even a single truly radical thought about schooling, about education in general and about learning and teaching. I can take Pat Kane’s general point above about the work ethic being at the centre of our global polity and I can undoubtedly place it squarely in the laps of those who decide and manage education policy across most countries in the world, almost without exception.
Professional Actions
Instead, the young people selected to undertake the programme of development, are introduced, through a range of high-quality experiences, to the six core values of leadership that Columba build their idea of leadership around, namely: awareness, focus, creativity, integrity, perseverance and service.
