The developments within the EU led to a unified internal as well as job market which has a huge impact on companies, employers and employees. Our students, being the future workforce, have to get prepared to meet these challenges.What are they in detail? Mobility, flexibility, individual initiative being the basis, language and media competence the next step and, especially today with the refugee crisis as one of the biggest challenges ever, tolerance and openness to the world. We have to develop all those in our students in order to become interculturally effective and advance a positive stance towards EU values.Our cooperation in a European school project is capable of realizing all of these, especially for those students who most probably will be involved in the further development of the EU on all levels: the high achievers. They are between 16 and 18 years of age, are highly motivated, ambitious as well as diligent and deliver an outstanding performance. But in many schools they often are not met with the appropriate recognition or support as low-achieving students very often are.The schools in our project have already noticed this lack and started to develop different solutions, now feeling the necessity to compare them and proceed to a more satisfactory and Europen solution, thus creating a need for school development.Our project is meant to push the students into this direction. It fosters their cognitive and social development, deepens their knowledge and offers them orientation in different vocations and university courses on a European scale, thus motivating them to work even more in order to gain more attractive career opportunities.The experience of everything this project has to offer is also intented to act as an eye-opener to our students towards a lifelong learning process.But the project work also has a considerable - and on a European level very important - effect on the staff. We, the teachers, have to improve our competences and expertise in promoting high achievers, as, very often, this side of education is not a part of a general teacher´s education.Our project strengthens the teachers´ professionalism by exchanging promotion activities for high achievers, making educational staff capable of using the new methods by appropriate trainings and making them acquainted with different educational systems, and all of this in a European context.We intend to realize these aims by organizing two transnational project meetings to which each of the five schools sends three representatives. Besides dealing with organisational details of the projects itself, we obtain trainings by education experts and exchange our so far developed procedures and methods. All the results will be summarized in a reader.This kind of teacher training will continue during the AULs (five students and two staff) from each school, the main objectivs of these meetings being the engagement of the students. They will visit different companies and institutions, take part in a variety of workshops and get to know specific professions making them more competent in their choice of career.The students process their learning progress and impressions in different kinds of self-reflection such as presentations which will – among others - be published on our eTwinning platform. There we also publish all evaluation results attained from the students, the teachers and the stakeholders in order to obtain answers about whether or not our measures are effective and suitable, thus serving as an ongoing evalution of the work process.This eTwinning platform respresents the basis of our European school network in which we collect all the contact details of everybody involved including the stakeholders. Furthermore we include the reader for the staff, all the information about the schools and regions such as intercutural ´traps`, thus making the comprehensive content available not only for the following high achievers but also for the teachers.The activities in our project will help schools to revise their individual programmes and to establish a permanent programme about how to promote high achievers on a European level.Our European network has significant potential for expansion as it is open for additions by other schools. Therefore it contributes to European integration by creating more coherence and on the other hand a more flexible exchange between national educational systems.
Thanks to the EU, regional labor markets have developed into a common European labor and internal market, so that employers face new demands that our pupils (P) have to face in their future professional and private lives. These requirements demand competences such as mobility, flexibility and initiative besides media and digital literacy, language skills and, especially at this very time, when the EU faces major challenges - Brexit, the shift to the right in many national parliaments or migration, - tolerance and open-mindedness in order to gain intercultural abilities and to develop a positive attitude towards the values of the EU. The students, our European project, "BRAINS IN ACTION", was mainly meant for, form a group, which is expected to shape Europe´s future in a special way and which is most likely to develop into positively European-minded citizens: the high performers (HP). These highly motivated, ambitious and hard-working students between 16 and 18 years of age achieve outstanding results in conventional education, but in many schools are given neither the same level of attention, encouragement nor support as is given to students who struggle academically. Only one of our partner schools (PS), namely BEL among GER, SLO and SWE, had been catering for the needs of underachievers – highly intelligent people who refuse to accept school work - before, thus leaving all of us in in need for school development in the sense of an upgrade in dealing with HP (who differ from underachievers). A first approach to this was provided by this project. It aimed at differentiating the cognitive and social development of these students in an extracurricular environment, expanding their expertise in specific areas as individually as possible as well as offering study and career options at a European level. Their career opportunities should be highly improved through their increased motivation for even better achievements in school. Thus, by promoting the abovementioned competences for lifelong learning, the P´s learning outcomes should be improved. These changed requirements in the EU not only required intensive preparation by the institution school, but at the same time implied that also their teachers (T) had to improve their skills and knowledge in dealing with HP, especially since these are not necessarily mandatory in the current teacher training programs. Therefore, this project also helped to strengthen the professional profile of teachers by increasing the teachers´ willingness to apply new methods in their daily work, while at the same time developing a greater awareness for different education systems in Europe, further enhancing their professionalism. However, an exchange of supporting measures regarding the promotion of HP between the PS could only take place to a limited extent, since the training also showed that a specific and concrete promotion of HP is, in general, only at the beginning. Specifically, the goals were achieved by developing framework conditions for this project (and the subsequent one) concerning organization and coordination during the three transnational project meetings (TPM) for T exclusively (maximum 3 T per TPM), besides teacher trainings by experts, whose most important findings regarding the promotion and support of HP were worked out in detail by the cooperation of the international team: These were summarized in an analogue as well as digital reader and made accessible to the public. These T training courses were also carried out during the three project-related teaching and learning mobilities (each with 5 P and 2 T per LTT). During these - and through the cooperation with 17 extracurricular institutions as well as parental support and T-contacts - the P and T were given the opportunity to visit companies (e.g. Munich Airport), museums (e.g. Red Star Line Museum Antwerp, Vastergotsland Museum Varnhem) and institutions (e.g. the European Parliament Brussels), to participate in workshops and lectures in universities (Munich Technical University, Max Planck Institute Munich, University of Louvain, University of Jönköping, University of Skövde) as well as getting to know special professions (e.g. newspaper editorial staff of Mariestad Tidningen) in order to widen their own horizons. And all of this with their improved options for study and career in mind. P were amply able to reflect on their impressions and their individual learning progress by working through self-assessment sheets, by individually designed portfolios as well as presentations which were produced within the internationally mixed groups during all activities and disseminated afterwards by the "Book a Student"-principle at their own schools. FORTSETZUNG IM ANHANG