The aim of this strategic partnership between five European educational institutions is to promote the exchange of good methods and learning by peers in the scope of foreign language teaching. The main goal of this project is to enable sharing and confrontation of ideas, good methods and innovative tools with the purpose of integrating them in the curriculum and thus strengthening the quality of teaching not only in our respective institutions but also in other European institutions due to the strong cooperation between the partner schools.Currently, as Europe is experiencing social upheavals, the school reflects these changes and has to make a contribution to the integration of all citizens. We want to prepare our schools for these changes and foreign language teaching is a primary domain as every step of integration starts with good communication. This is why it is important to offer a good quality teaching and elaborate educational methods.The five partners of this partnership have an innovative pedagogical approach as a starting point, focusing on the learner and using properly information and communication technology (ICT) as well as innovative methodologies such as gamification, flipped classroom, efficient use of the smart board and video and introducing art in the foreign language teaching. Our goal is to explore the potential of pedagogical approaches in the area of functional objectives suggested by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) through elaboration, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of these methodologies.Those who benefit:The teachers: every partner has specialized in a certain field and thus we will all be learning from each other, which improves the competence of the teacher profession in each institution taking part in this project. For every field will be organized a formation week for the teachers: in Belgium, the expertise lies in smart boards, in Germany, video, in Finland, various forms of art and their introduction in the foreign language learning, in Italy, flipped classroom, in Portugal, gamification. The teachers will instruct their colleagues and be instructed themselves, they will elaborate, test, evaluate and implement the innovative methods. Many of these innovative methods will be carried out using ICT, this way the teachers are supposed to develop their digital skills.By witnessing the achievements and the motivation of the pupils, the teachers will also be more motivated to integrate these new methods in their everyday work.Furthermore, the teachers will also develop their linguistic skills.Finally, the coordinators, in European teams, will develop their cooperation skills due to the two transnational meetings and get better in leading a European project into its term.The pupils:Simultaneously with the teacher workshops will be organized five learning mobility weeks for the pupils who will participate actively in the creation, realization and the evaluation of the activities. Due to their active participation the pupils will be more motivated in learning foreign languages and develop their linguistic skills as well as their cooperation skills while working in European teams. A progression in their school results is to be expected. Many of these innovative methods will be carried out using ICT, thus the pupils will have a better digital competence. We will create a portfolio for every participating pupil. A Europass will add value to their experiences and competences achieved during this project.Tangible results:A web site will be set up in order to publish the innovative methods elaborated during the project. It will be divulged via eTwinning and School Education Gateway so that other European teachers can profit from our work.A webinar will be organized on the eTwinning platform in order to spread our good methods to European language teachers.Intangible results:The communication through eTwinning, Facebook and Twitter allows the teachers and pupils involved in this project to become better European citizens within the frame of lifelong learning. They improve their life together in a multicultural Europe.While learning other foreign languages besides English with motivation and thus getting better results, the pupils will have increased possibilities in finding a meaningful occupation in the future.A large number of people will benefit from this project in the long run, considering the fact that many teachers will make use of these innovative methods during their lessons and thus, other pupils, having benefited from the results of this project, may themselves become language teachers one day.
The main objective of our strategic partnership between five European schools with its major focus on the exchange of good practices in classes of foreign languages was to exchange innovative approaches by collaborating intensively in order to improve the quality of our lessons due to the implementation of innovative methods. However, our students, who could participate in an active exchange both virtually in our TwinSpace and in real life thanks to the mobilities organized at our five schools, played a decisive role. Apart from the Italian school - a professional training secondary school focusing on tourism - all participating secondary schools provide a general education. Europe seems to face some radical changes currently, which is also reflected in school: students have to be prepared for an increasingly digitalised world, but furthermore especially aspects of intercultural communication are becoming more and more important. Classes of foreign languages seem crucial to us in this context, so we wanted to focus on multilingualism (e.g. emphasis on other languages apart from English as the lingua franca) in our French project. All five partner schools of our project started with an innovative approach based on student-oriented tasks combining a practical use of information and communication technologies: an efficient use of digital whiteboards, creative work with videos, the concepts "flipped classroom" and "gamification" and interdisciplinary work linking arts and languages were the major aspects of our projet and these approaches were tested in product-oriented tasks by our students before being evaluated and finally dissiminated in our five schools by the participating teachers. Apart from the continous collaboration in our TwinSpace, we organised one mobility at every school (a combination of short-term exchange and staff training for teachers) with a group of 4 students and 2 teachers per country. During each mobility we organised a training in order to explain the host school's innvovative approach to the partner schools. The methods were tested actively and evaluated by our students in order to be implemented at our five partner schools. Questionnaires and interviews after the mobilites showed that all five approaches could contribute to an increased motivation for our students. Due to the use of information and communication technologies both students and teachers could improve their competences with regards to digital media. Moreover, our intense collaboration encouraged an improvement concerning the communicative competence of all participants (in French and English) as well as their intercultural comptence. Even though not all participants clearly improved their results in language classes at school, we definitely could observe enormous progress with regard to the development of the students' personality, cultural openness, motivation for language learning and independence. Every participating students was given a Europass documenting their experience and the competences acquired during the project. All products created throughout the project, the results of all evaluations as well as an overview of the approaches used can be found on our website and in our TwinSpace, which are available to the public, so even other European colleagues can profit from our work through eTwinning. Some of our products were published on the Project Results Platform to serve as examples. Furterhmore, every coordinator developed two didactic sequences including the five innovative approaches we worked with. These sequences are available on the PRP as well. In a webinar organised via eTwinning Live all five approaches were presented. Apart from that, our project is represented in some of the common social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). Due to this project all participants could refelct their role as European citizens and appreciate the way of living together in a multicultural Europe full of diversity. The focus on French as the major language of the project as well as the general challenge to communicate efficiently without using their mother tongue has left a huge impact on the students, whcih will be a great advantage for them in the future.