Like in previous years, ten months to be spent together started with the Summer School, this time held at Jadwisin near Warsaw.

The new students were welcomed by Polish-American Freedom Foundation Program Director Marianna Hajdukiewicz. She noted that all programs run by the PAFF have the same three priorities, namely: evaluation allowing constant development, synergy of individual projects, and alumni networking facilitating development of engaged professionals community.

“Our objective is to break through to mass education with solutions we create and test. And that is what we do at the School of Education, starting with the fact that many of our staff expert members have joined the process of forming educational reality. The School of Education is a laboratory (…), various solutions we create here serve as inspiration to teachers, lecturers and people in charge of Polish education. And you, the students, are the core of that mechanism,” Marianna Hajdukiewicz said.

The School of Education director Prof. Jolanta Sujecka-Zając spoke in her opening lecture, the only one she gives over 10 months of the course (on the daily basis the lecturers prefer more activating forms of classes) about more than 100 years of studies on critical thinking. She quoted John Dewey and pointed out that the teachers shall start with analyzing themselves as  their possible carelessness and chaos are being taken over by their students.

“At the School of Education, we will constantly form you and keep you in the state of permanent uncertainty and suspension of your judgement. We will persuade you to make mistakes and reflect constantly,” Prof. Sujecka-Zając said.

Now, the School of Education students are facing four days of integration, simulation and first meta-reflection classes. And all that is just the introduction to their 10-month-long process of paving the way of their teacher’s development under the post-graduate course.