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The Foundation Open Society – Macedonia together with the partner organization FOKIM “Step by Step”, and during a pandemic and state of emergency in the country, continued to support learning communities that were formed during 2019 in ten project schools.

Learning communities are an innovative form of contextualized professional development and enable teachers to work on improving their daily pedagogical practice through independent work and research, as well as through discussion and exchange with colleagues. In that learning process, teachers exchange information of various kinds, enabling, above all, a better flow of information in the school itself, but also individually among teachers. In this way, there is an opportunity to see and solve many issues related to everyday work, but also to the school in general.

As required by the conditions, we replaced the traditional mentoring meetings with the teaching staff, facilitated by the experienced trainers, with online mentoring meetings that we realized during the month of May. The purpose of these meetings was to review the implementation of development activities and development portfolios, an activity we started last year, but even more to discuss how to conduct online teaching, the challenges faced by teachers and teaching staff and the needs they have for the easier realization of this type of teaching.

We used the online meetings to discuss the role of learning communities in this period and how much the acquired skills for collaboration and collegial learning have helped them in the past specific period. At the same time, we used them for an open and honest conversation with the teachers and concluded that although unannounced and without prior preparation from a technical and pedagogical point of view for this way of implementing the educational process, teachers working in rural areas have a good rapport with students. They try to encourage them to enrich their knowledge, but also to offer them support in everyday life challenges.

It is a great pleasure for us that about 80 members of the learning communities, after the establishment, continued to work through this form of collegial learning and professional development. Learning communities offer opportunities for independent work and research, discussions with colleagues, and improved daily pedagogical practice for each teacher member of the community.

The learning communities are organized within the concept “Education of the smaller ethnic communities” of the Foundation Open Society – Macedonia.

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8 June 2020