By Katherine Tek, Senior Project Manager, Childhood Education International

Welcome! This is the second post in our blog series about Communities of Practice (CoPs), where we’re  sharing ways that CoPs give power to educators and education practitioners to refine their craft in teaching and learning and improve education for children. CoPs offer the opportunity for educators and other leaders to empower each other and promote peer-to-peer learning.

This blog post focuses on educators and other education leaders in Serbia who have started CoPs with support from Childhood Education International. Educators, education practitioners, and school leaders in schools in Serbia wanted to come together in communities to address a shared concern: How can we integrate social-emotional learning techniques and practices in our schools so that children’s social-emotional competencies and school climate improve?

Launching a CoP in Serbia

For the educators at the schools we worked with in Serbia, it was the first time they had joined a CoP, yet they were committed and passionate about trying new approaches for themselves and their school environments. Let’s take a look at what these schools did by forming their Communities of Practices focused on SEL.

Members of various CoPs gather for a larger meeting to discuss what they bring to a CoP.

In the project Social-emotional Character Development: A Community of Practice Framework from 2022 to early 2025, professionals from five schools across Serbia first set about understanding what it would mean to establish Communities of Practice that focused on SEL integration. With support from the John Templeton Foundation, CE International partnered with the CIP Center for Interactive Pedagogy and the University of Belgrade to train school mentors on the theories that cement best practices for establishing Communities of Practice, such as what was presented in our first blog post in this series.

In many places around the world, a community of practice may be novel and outside of what teachers and education practitioners usually do.  It was important to provide capacity building on how communities of practice can lead to alternative thinking, research, and new solutions and products to their learning environments. Communities of Practice can be a wonderful way to develop as a professional, but teachers and school leaders can also form CoPs to conduct learning and research that are just as supportive as to what external researchers may do! (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2011; Caine & Caine, 2010).

Using CoPs to Grow SEL

In Serbia, more than sixty educators, education practitioners, and school leaders formed five CoPs across the schools. Together they inquired about what was affecting the school climate, student behavior, peer conflict and relationships, parental engagement, among other challenges. They considered the social-emotional methods that they could integrate in curriculum and what could possibly strengthen student outcomes.

Members of Communities of Practice gather for a meeting in Stepojevac, Serbia.

Each CoP used participatory action research (PAR) methods, meaning that those in the CoP involved students, parents, and other community members to define the challenges, figure out solutions, and take actions. This collaborative and action-oriented approach empowered everyone to be involved and make positive change. 

For example, the teachers in one CoP wanted to inquire how to improve peer cooperation and trust among students in their classes. They decided to involve the students and survey them, asking them about their self-awareness, how they perceive themselves, and how they perceive others. When did they see how cooperation works best, when was it hard, and how could it be improved? What methods, such as certain activities, forms of work, or group formations,  would enhance cooperation for them?

The teachers in the CoP also conducted a workshop with students, in which they discussed how their similarities and differences relate to mutual acceptance or rejection. Moreover, the students made specific suggestions on how to improve mutual cooperation in class. Based on the collected suggestions, action plans were created and applied, and the teachers in the CoP monitored the action plans to see if student cooperation and peer relationships did indeed improve.

The participatory action research approach showed that the CoP leaned in on the word “community,” because the teachers who made up the CoP reached out to those in the affected community, such as the students, to find solutions to the school challenges and also integrate SEL, such as studying self-awareness and social awareness skills. 

Using the CoPs for Future SEL Implementation

The schools in Serbia continue to use communities of practice and to work toward integrating social-emotional learning into their schools. The CoPs at each school have also come together for horizontal learning and as a larger community of practice of sorts to share their experiences and to share what they conduct in SEL at their respective schools.

The hope is that more and more schools may be able to form their own communities of practice focused on SEL integration, or that they may even be able to reform or merge as communities of practice across schools. One of the schools shared that because of the CoP they formed, “there will be more joint activities in the upcoming school year with parents and students based on their ideas, suggestions, and interests.” This demonstrates that the CoP prioritized considering the needs of those within the greater community so that they can learn to implement SEL to a greater effect.

Overall, the communities of practice in Serbia have made great strides to grow and strengthen SEL integration in their school communities, and we look forward to seeing how they grow. 

About the Author

Katherine Tek, Senior Project Manager, Childhood Education International

Katherine Tek is an education professional with over 15 years of teaching and training experience and work on psychosocial support and social-emotional learning concepts for schools and international non-profit organizations. With a master’s in French language and literature, she has taught and worked on education projects in the U.S., Haiti, and Senegal. After completing a master’s in international education, she worked within mainly the U.S. emergencies space and focused on PSS/SEL programs. She is passionate about education quality and how we can all support children’s and teacher’s well-being and resilience building.