Teaching vocational and technical students can be a tough job. It’s not easy for young people to sit still and listen to a teachers for a long time, especially for students in vocational courses. Their teachers have to search for methods to keep their attention so that they learn and become adults who can take responsibilities and carry out their future profession. ‘Active Learning’ is such a method. Its purpose is learn in an active way by ‘watching’, ‘discussing’, ‘presenting’ and ‘doing’ as a means to get them to learn their profession. The role of the teacher is ‘passive’, he will not give the information through oral proclamation. He will need to by a guide to point the students in the right direction, motivate them when they tend to give up, etc. For most teacher this is leaving his comfort zone – where he is when he is active teaching – and take step into an unknown territory. Our project hopes to create a practical guide for teachers in general and teachers in electrical departments in particular. We will prepare some active learning methods, try them out, evaluate them and publish them. The technical installations that probably will be built during the active learning and teaching activities, can be used later on in both schools. An experience from past projects is that working together on a common goal, using and showing basic skills, forced to speak another language, etc. is the best way to train intercultural and cooperative skills. For this project we have chosen to work as practical as possible. This is the reason why we are only with two partners and we limit the visiting students to 6. Working with a smaller group gives us the advantage that the teachers can have a better overview on what is happening.
As teachers in technical schools we try to use different methods to teach our student. Especially when teaching vocational and technical students it's necessary to change the methods of teaching often. One of these methods is 'Active Learning'. The objectives of our project was to prepare, use and evaluate active learning methods. In our project we where with 2 schools: the Oscar Romerocollege from Belgium and the Gullmarsgymnasiet from Sweden. Both schools have a technical department and from this department it's the electrical teacher and students who where part of this. Most of the students where studying on a vocational level. We've chosen 3 different subjects to work with. Each year we've worked out one of these. So we had a project about how to teach 'Earthing Systems', another project was 'Fault Finding' and the last was about 'Home Automation'. For each of these themes we worked out a package of lessons that we can you in our own curriculum and we talked and demonstrated it to our local colleagues. We also published the results on our website. To achieve these results we had four 'Transnational Project Meetings' to plan, organise, discus and evaluate the preparations and past activities. For the 'Learning/Teaching/Training Activities' we had chosen to do two of them each year, one in each country. During these 'Learning/Teaching/Training Activities' we tested out the prepared lessons. We discussed them with the students and with the involved teachers. Adjustment where made to prepared lessons and tried out again. We also used some of the time to 'build' some parts necessary for the projects. And we has some cultural activities and factory visits as well. The involved teacher as well as our colleagues where enthusiast about the results. Our prepared lessons and materials are still in use in both schools. It also gave us the experience to work out more lessons in a 'Active Learning' fashion. So this project has certainly had a positive impact on how we want to evolve as teachers.