originally posted on https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/cl/PointstoPonder/

I have an eclectic music collection but the “standards” are never far away so listening to Ella Fitzgerald on a very rainy Sunday is always ideal. This morning one of my favourites came on about one of my favourite places-Paris. Given the dreadful events of Friday I stopped and didn’t start working again for several minutes.
How do you make any sense of the actions taken on Friday? As a teacher how do we protect, guide and support our young people in the light of such actions? The awfully clever DHT and I were out and about last week. We went up to Perth to be part of a national conversation with other colleagues from primary and secondary education. There were HTs and DHTs from several authorities and we were there to listen to speakers; including the Minister for Education talk about Social Justice. We chose to go because equity, equality, inclusion and just doing the best for our young people and their families, are at the heart of what we do in our school. As I often write; we are in the business of improving people. The Scottish Government has Social Justice running throughout their education programme we were interested to hear what was being said. To be honest it wasn’t anything new, but, as always talking with colleagues was interesting, reaffirming and challenging. We dissected, discussed and the DHT muttered as he does, on the journey home.
The message from everyone was we are doing our best for our learning community. The issues, challenges and successes were all very similar. There was a shared ethos in the challenges of budgets, training and hard-to-engage families. There were some tricks of the trade shared. The theme of helping our young people to use the opportunities we can source, to help enable them to be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens is alive and thriving in our schools. Talking to colleagues from across Scotland, sharing our progress with staff, and working together as we will next week in our in-service days renews our sense of purpose. These four capacities are at the heart of our Scottish education system and they are real and tangible. Against all this hard work, compassion and commitment we then have to think about what events such as the tragedy in Paris means to our communities. We are global citizens, we are part of this. For me it makes me square my shoulders and renew my focus, along with everyone in our learning community, to do our best for our young people and count our many blessings.