Our project is focused on the adaptation of the European Commission’s Policy on the field of Early School Leaving (ESL) within participating schools. Taking the statement "...Early school leaving is linked to unemployment, social exclusion, and poverty. There are many reasons why some young people give up education and training prematurely: personal or family problems, learning difficulties, or a fragile socio-economic situation. The way the education system is set up and the environment in individual schools are also important factors..." (“http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/school/early-school-leavers_en.htm”) as a starting point, our purpose is to exchange ideas and practices of learning Values, increase them by creating new methodological Curricula and share it among partners. The main goal of the project is to deal with awareness of early school leaving on a European scale. The project stands for Europe, Values and Motivating School all in one. Values are the root of everything, but also the key that opens many doors. It’ll help you understand people’s lifestyles, cultures, decisions, ... without putting aside your own lifestyle etc. Values will be our main theme which will be addressed in 6 smaller topics. We’ll work on Values as following: 1. Values in local area (environment - village/town, industry/farming etc) 2. Options to spend free time in and around (incl, youth clubs etc) 3. Cultural values and traditions in local area (historical etc) 4. Nature around local area (ecology, green area, power plant, green air etc) 5. Values inside me - self-esteem, feeling safe, showing tolerance 6. Values inside me - team-work, take initiative. introducing cultures, The project is designed to enhance the educational experience across all curriculum areas. Students will have lessons and learn practically doing and living the world around them. They'll watch, examine, search and research, collect, organize, plan, create, produce. They'll work cooperating in groups having different roles in them. A significant aspect is setting up guidelines to safely deal with social networks in order to help students to protect themselves from the dangers involved. Students will also develop the skills of entrepreneurship by advertising and distributing the final products of the project such as a film about the project, a animation about the ELS as main topic, a short film to be sent to children's film festival 2017 etc... We will organize teaching and learning activities at partnerschools. Activities such as Storytelling and Animation/Film will be participated by student groups. There is been created 3 training events for teachers and staff. The significant part of training sessions will be planning and creating the new methodology for dealing the ESL issue. We will also take a closer look to a cooperation between institutions inside a community and find ways to prevent ESL. Every school partner will collect their experiences and describe them step by step in a final catalogue both in paper version and on he web in order to disseminate it as samples of dealing with Early Leaving School at schools. By the end of the project we hope to have instilled a strong sense of Values in everyone involved that will continue to be shared within the school networks, the families, the adjoining communities and the lifelong learning group to ensure that the essence of this project lives on.
Our project is focused on the adaptation of the European Commission’s Policy on the field of Early School Leaving (ESL) within participating schools. The main goal of the project was to deal with awareness of early school leaving on a European scale. The project main coordinator is the school from Estonia, and the other six partners are from Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Turkey and Croatia. The partner schools from Turkey and Croatia are located in the countries’ capital cities, and the remaining partner schools come from smaller communities. This was a first-time participation in this type of projects for Croatian partners, the other partners had previous experience with Erasmus+. The project teams from Poland and Italy include eTwinning ambassadors. The focus of the project was thinking about values as the basis of the individual personality as well as the society on the whole. Recognition and development of values through the exchange of ideas and experiences were viewed as the essential framework for a high-quality school, and life. This topic was symbolically pointed out in the activity Box of Values. Each partner made their own box of values, and the boxes were exchanged among the partners in each mobility. Each school added their own values in the boxes as they journeyed around Europe. Eventually, each school got their own box back, now containing the values of all seven partner schools. Throughout the two years we tried to make a positive impact on the quality of work within the school curriculum through a great number of intertwined activities and mobilities, with the aim to help in the development of a more positive attitude of students towards school. We improved the motivation of the teachers through staff training events, allowing them to apply new knowledge in their work with students, which improved the quality of work in the school and also had a positive effect on the student motivation. The project had been structured in such a way that each partner had to host one mobility, and five teachers got the opportunity to take part in job shadowing events. This assured an even distribution of responsibilities, as well as giving each partner equal opportunity to present themselves. Students traveled to Portugal, Italy and Croatia. The topic of the student mobility to Portugal was storytelling. The students studied traditional folk stories and legends and participated in a storytelling festival. The result of their hard work is the e-book “Keepers of the Values”. In Italy, where to students from Portugal and Croatia traveled, the topic was free time. The students participated in sports and art activities, which promoted the development of their social skills, of a positive attitude towards exercise, and of creativity in an informal, relaxed setting. In Croatia, the students attended an animation workshop. The result of their work is an animated film “Journey of the Legends”, which was based on the stories of the storytelling festival in Portugal. To ensure the quality of the workshops, external local experts had to be engaged for the workshops in Portugal – a professional storyteller, and Croatia – a film studio. In staff training mobilities, the teachers exchanged their experiences on the issues of early school leaving, reflected on the relationship of the school with the local community with regard to the prevention of early school leaving and improving the quality of work (Norway), studied new ways of teaching in the segment of outdoor learning, whether it be in a natural environment (Estonia) or an urban setting (Turkey, Croatia). There were two transnational project meetings (Poland, Italy), and few video conferences. Five eTwinning projects were opened for the purposes of this project, one as the main, “umbrella”, project and the other for specific activities. Web page: https://twinspace.etwinning.net/5992. Towards the end of the project, a documentary film “The Project Values” was created, incorporating video materials from all the partners, both teachers and students. The film emphasizes the main topic of the project – prevention of ESL. We hope that this film might move other European schools to get involved in Erasmus+ projects. The documentary’s viewpoint is personal to highlight one of the essential ideas of the project, namely the expression of personal thoughts and feelings, as part of the process of individual development and as the basis of the improvement of school quality in the 21st century. This project had a lasting effect on all of the institutions and individuals that participated in it. We found out about the differences and similarities of our school systems, we experienced the cultural diversity of Europe, we developed social skills and the abilities of team work, we improved our English language skills, we learned some simple expressions in the languages of the partners, we broadened our ICT skills and learned about Internet safety.