This project has arisen from the need for improvements at the level of innovative pedagogical practices in education by all the partners. We all have best practices we would like to share with teachers from other European countries, allowing us to increase the European dimension of our schools. Nevertheless, we are aware that there is so much each of us can learn from our peers. Having debated these issues on eTwinning, we have come to the conclusion that each one of these seven partners has knowledge about one particular innovative pedagogical practice that all the others want to acquire in order to improve their own teaching practices. At the same time, we hope that by doing so we will be able to promote collaborative learning and enhance critical thinking, creative thinking and problem solving skills among our students and to get them actively engaged in their learning process and take responsibility for it. The collaboration we will maintain between the seven schools will provide opportunities for our students to construct knowledge collaboratively when working together on tasks and help them develop key skills and competences like team work, cultural competences, language learning, tolerance, just to name a few.We expect to involve in this process around 1500 participants, both direct (teachers and students) and indirect (school board members, parents, parents associations, local government, auxiliary staff, etc). This project is mainly based on learning/teaching/training activities both for teachers and for students. Students will be able to attend themed workshops, some ICT related, some vocational related during the learning/teaching/training activities. All our students will be given the opportunity to improve key competences and skills, such as multiculturalism and IT, to learn through innovative approaches, to work collaboratively with their peers, to identify and solve problems through critical thinking, to improve their linguistic competences and also their intercultural competences. We have planned two transnational meetings and five learning/teaching/training activities. On each of these activities, teachers will have the chance of attending a themed workshop where they their hosts will share their best practices with them and learn innovative pedagogical practices and methodologies which will be implemented on their teaching practices upon return from the activities. Furthermore, the teachers who have participated in these workshops will organise a similar workshop at their schools, this way allowing for more teachers to acquire those innovative practices and methodologies. The goal here is to enable a large number of teachers to improve their teaching practices in order to create a 21st century creative, innovative and motivating classroom, using an ICT active learning student-centered approach. And because the whole project is based upon providing teachers with innovative teaching practices, we believe that these practices will be implemented for many years to come, thus ensuring the sustainability of this project.
We were a group of schools who decided to come together to have the opportunity of learning with and from each other through exchanging/sharing of best practices, experiences, insights and ideas in order to achieve the same goals: provide students with basic and transversal skills, prevent early school leaving and offer students a high quality education. Each partner felt the need for improvements at the level of innovative pedagogical practices in education. Because of that, we discussed and researched which innovative pedagogical practices and digital tools we would like to implement in our teaching practices in order to create a 21st century creative, innovative and motivating classroom, using an ICT active learning student-centered approach. The team consisted of five European schools:Gug skole (Denmark), Agrupamento de Escolas Professor Paula Nogueira (Portugal), Cirkevna spojena skola (Slovakia),ODTU GELISTIRME VAKFI OZEL ORTAOKULU (Turkey) and Publiczne Gimnazjum nr 11 im. Bolesława Prusa (Poland).The main-activities were two transnational meetings in Portugal November 2016 where the content was based on: presenting the long-term workplan - deciding on the assessment, dissemination and quality plans and which tools to be used - establishing a framework for budget control - organising the learning/teaching/training activities - discussing arrangements regarding students’ exchanges and a transnational meeting in Denmark June 2019 where the focus was on assessment of the activities developed during the three years and their impact - development of the Sustainability plan - final conclusions and reflections We had planned 5 learning/teaching/training activities, one on each partner school. In short, the learning/teaching/training activities hadthe purpose of themed workshops for students and teachers, but they also provided an opportunity to: - share experiences, challenges and knowledge; - get knowledge about each country's educational system; - introduce local culture and traditions. Each hosting school was being responsible for elaborating an agenda, which was then sent to all the partners, to allow them to make the suggestions they feel necessary. After each activity, one of the partner schools would be in charge of producing a newsletter containing reports on the workshops, results of questionnaires/surveys and other topics - all put on to our website for the project.