Let me take you on a journey across the Mediterranean sea, on the coast side of the Iberian Peninsula, arriving at a colorful school in the beautiful barrio of Cabanyal, in the city of Valencia. It is not just any school, it is a Learning Community.

At this school, students and parents are closely intertwined with an open minded teaching team to accommodate the understanding of a new educational model. And it is fascinating to see it work, in the pillars of dialog learning and collaboration with the objective of building confidence and knowledge in the leaders of tomorrow.

You can enter the class and from the start, you will notice the close relation with the teacher as an authority. However, it is not the authority that comes from fear, instead it is all about respect, trust and encouraging good values and attitudes.

You might be surprised to encounter four adults in one classroom, but that is quite normal, we are having interactive groups. Our role is just to dynamize the group, while the students find the solution together moving through different tasks. Even if they can’t see the impact now, we smile at the thought of how this environment enables them with social skills and easy adaptation to any group that they might be a part of in the future, both professionally and personally.

If you stay until the end of the class, you will hear some colors in Spanish with the younger students and some numbers with the older students. It is the evaluation, but is it not something the teacher does, it is actually the students. They evaluate how the group worked and collaborated, what activities they liked, congratulate or constructively criticize someone and evaluate themselves individually in two categories: work in class and attitude. What a way to encourage getting to know yourself, practice self-control and learn to be honest! As an incentive, if most of the evaluations are good, it will also increase their mark at the end.

This approach stretches from an eight years old child who begins to learn how to express themselves, to a teenager who comes to a realization that knowledge is not a possessive noun, rather something that can be shared.

You might feel I keep gushing about the school but once you get the idea of my environment, I will move on to my experience. Walking these hallways every day, being surrounded by teachers that inspire you, feeling like you learned how to react with kids and then something happens that leaves you confused, is truly rewarding and humbling. Although sometimes I feel like my actions might seem insignificant, even the smallest “grains of sand” can become the building blocks of the identity of these young people. And if I took my pink glasses off for a second, I will tell you that there are days I am practicing patience, days I feel like every filter-less remark from a kid can get to me and even with that, it would still be a pink world.

Sashka Stefanovska
ESC “Supporting Learning Communities” – Valencia, Spain