What is a school?

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday June 15, 2026 06:00

It is about the interactions among all the people who live and work in it. It is about the harmonious relationships that prevail within a community occupying the same building to achieve a common purpose. A school is a learning community. Learning can never come from one single party. It should spring from multiple streams. And learning, as a matter of fact, has no cul-de-sac.

No one can claim to be educationally saturated. Even teachers have gaps which should be filled. Learning, therefore, is a continuing process. Learning from multiple sources means teachers are students too, and students are teachers too. Learning is a continuous exchange of notes and experiences between teachers and students. It is best described as a two-way street designed for the mutual benefit of the entire school learning community. Sadly, some schools can drift and depart from the desired community spirit. Here are some glaring signs of a school devoid of a sense of community.

People who are supposed to be comrades in arms, striving and pulling together to accomplish a common mission, act and behave like competitors and adversaries. They hardly convene to craft strategies geared towards solving common problems of instructional practice. There are no swapping notes, no sharing of experiences, and no peer support or team teaching.

They come to schools as individual performers who happen to be sharing a common building. Even practitioners who are wrestling the same subject work independently. This happens when everyone has a sense of adequacy, which poses a serious stumbling block to curiosity and discovery. A sense of adequacy disguises and clouds people’s vulnerabilities and blind spots. Lack of cross-fertilisation of ideas leads to limited or no dynamism.

Classroom practitioners become content with doing more of the same year in and out. Old ideas and approaches are rehearsed and repeated with monotonous regularity. Problems and baggage are carried over from one academic year to the other. Stagnancy becomes the order of the day. Students stand to lose in this kind of professional setting. When teachers work as stand-alone entities, they deprive students of diverse perspectives. Exposure to different teachers offers a rich and thrilling learning experience.

Consequently, a school that works in silos can hardly achieve its mission of improving student learning outcomes. Team teaching, especially in under-resourced schools, is not an option but a matter of life and death. Here is why peer support in schools is a necessity rather than a luxury. Gone are the days when schools were sufficiently funded. Every public school is running on a shoestring budget. Schools are not only facing an acute shortage of critical teaching and learning inputs, but also a drought of ongoing professional development. This means the teaching profession is at risk of getting rusty when there are no workshops and seminars. Schools should therefore rely on their own internal strength to remain pedagogically relevant.

Harnessing and pooling together limited resources is a survival strategy which all schools should embrace if they are to thrive and prosper. Schools should normalise peer support, which entails planning together and sharing best practices. Mini 20-30-minute workshops could be arranged at break time to address matters of instructional practice. The advantages of such workshops are that they are focused, less laborious, and free of charge. The frequency with which such workshops are held can revive a spirit of collegiality and togetherness while profoundly impacting learning outcomes. Students should not be left behind in the quest for more and better learning outcomes. Involving them actively in the teaching and learning process is a recognition of their inbuilt power as a learning resource.

Adopting a research-based teaching method that allows students to wrestle with complex tasks at home, either individually or in groups, is a good survival strategy. Teachers should trust that throwing students into the deep end helps them to explore and discover their potential. Teachers stand to benefit from the energy and research potential of their students. Students benefit enormously from peer support. Concepts that appear difficult when taught by teachers could be taught by students with relative ease in a less exacting environment.

Teachers should accept that students are capable of cascading the material they have learned to their fellow students. Teachers who are already overwhelmed by heavy teaching loads should leverage students’ potential as a powerful resource for teaching and learning. Teaching should not be based on the solo efforts of individual actors. Rather, it should be a shared responsibility.