Parys, Free State, is one of those places that make you chuckle when it’s mentioned.
For one, the name may be misconstrued with a slip of the tongue – no, we did not mean to say Paris, thank you very much.
So upon hearing that we would have to road-trip to Parys – a first-time visit for the both of us – to attend and be observers at one of the Kagiso Shanduka Foundation Trust’s retreats for transforming schools and their educators, we were both excited.
We were going to witness a change and the empowering of South African educators, as well as discover a part of the country that was still foreign to us.
However, we didn’t anticipate the huge personal learning curves we would encounter at the retreat.
The Kagiso Shanduka Foundation Trust retreats are designed to help schools that are not performing make a change, find new inspiration in providing excellent standards of education, and remotivate the schools’ teachers.
Teachers are taken away to a beautiful conference venue, where over a weekend they participate in activities and sessions that help them identify where and how they are failing to perform as a team and individuals. The sessions help equip them with tools to change their actions and behaviours, in order to provide a great learning environment and produce well-educated and well-rounded learners.
Our goal was to observe, take notes of the educators’ experiences and learnings, and of course take enough photos to produce a reflections booklet for the Beyers Naude School Development Programme upon our return.
And so we remained in the shadows, swiftly taking notes and occasionally peering out to stick a camera lens in participants’ faces.
From the first day of the retreat, we began to discuss the issues being presented in the sessions, and caught ourselves doing our own individual reflections.
Who are we? What are our goals? Are we being effective employees at Flow? What could we do better to become more effective team members of the company? Do we follow Flow values and apply them to our working life daily?
Working for a company that places emphasis on elements such as goals, teamwork and values, we had no difficulty at all answering these questions.
It was truly enlightening and refreshing to be in a different setting, around people who are responsible for educating our future generations.