Brno, Husova Primary School and Kindergarten

Involvement in the project? A long and painful but rewarding process

The Helping Schools Succeed project is changing how we think about teaching and learning. For pupils and teachers. We revised our school’s vision so that we can plan and evaluate our professional development and the development of the whole school. This put students, learning and their results at the centre of our attention.

From reading to peer collaboration

At our school, the project kick-started our work in developing reading, formative assessment, critical literacy, and most recently, writing. Our teachers now routinely use the Czech E-R-R (Evocation – Realisation of Meaning – Reflection) constructivist model of learning and active learning methods in the classroom. By sharing practices with colleagues from other project schools, enquiry-based learning has also taken hold at our school. We make use of reading workshops, reading lessons and disciplinary literacy.

In the current school year, we are attempting to develop collegial collaboration: we are trialling triads of open lessons, setting up learning groups, and so on. None of this would be possible without the expertise and support under the project.

Inspiration and support

From the wide range of available project activities, we especially use and appreciate the meetings for teachers from all participating schools. These meetings focus on experiential and disciplinary literacy and sharing subject-specific experience. All our teaching staff have participated twice in the Festival of Teaching Inspiration hosted by Kunratice Primary School. The festival is an opportunity to gain much insight into practical teaching, and several of our teachers have also led its workshops. The Summer School is another source of annual inspiration for us. We regularly attend project management working meetings with the project schools’ managers, project consultants and pedagogical leaders. We have excellent support from project consultants. Besides assisting in the professional development of teachers, they also contribute, together with the school’s managers and internal leaders, in planning the development of teaching throughout the school.

Teachers turn to project consultants in preparing open classes or evaluating the impact of their teaching on students. They also work with them to address specific teaching-related problems, introduce new methods and practices, or seek their advice on stimulating texts and books on various topics and objectives. The support provided by project consultants is also very useful in the planning and holding of regular workshops for groups of interested teachers or the whole teaching staff.

Transforming the school from the ground up

Our involvement in the Helping Schools Succeed project has profoundly changed the entire culture of our school. It has been a long and sometimes painful process, but it has also proved extremely beneficial.

Roman Tlustoš

Head Teacher

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