Demotivated students are a reality that teachers face nowadays. Our students often lack motivation as far as learning for school subjects is concerned, and they use to show lack of initiative and willingness to participate in school activities, unless they deal with aspects concerning their own interest. They miss the reference to real life. This leads to demotivated attitude toward learning and frustration, because they fail to see the purpose why they should learn subjects that seem to have no relevance to real life. This also leads to underachievement and often to dropping out of school. This situation happens during one of the most difficult period of life, adolescence. Our project wants the students learn to apply their theoretical school knowledge to practical work, and to find out its importance for their future lives.This project aims to involve teacher and students of four European schools, in a common project to address the specific necessities our schools have in order to enhance creativity, innovation, competences achievement, high performance and low performance students´ motivation, commitment to reduce early school leaving and strategies to tackle disadvantages. Our schools have a double challenge in order to get all students’ academic and personal success: to improve the underachievement in getting basic competences and skills in low performance students, and on the other hand to facilitate the achievement of high-level competences in high performance students.In addition to this, to counteract real situations of social disadvantage that some of our students have is our strong preoccupation. Developing this project, the schools involved in it will create an atmosphere of equity, and will provide activities for everybody to take part in order to compensate the social disadvantages and opportunities.The participating schools from England, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain making up the partnership are four schools with different backgrounds that differ in their profiles, but facing similar educational problems. The Italian, the Dutch and the British schools are big Secondary Education Schools (around 1500 pupils) compared to the Spanish (100 pupils), this will offer our students and teachers a different view of organization at school. The Italian school is scientific and grammar including Electronics, Telecommunications and Business courses, the Dutch school has a bilingual stream in English and expertise in ICT teaching, the English school combining innovative and traditional methods in the classroom, is a record reference of excellent examination results, and the Spanish school brings experience in inclusive education and collaborative work. Project implementation will be carried out by a wide range of activities, but they will be mainly collaborative team work lessons and creative workshops.Projects contents are divided into four blocks; each of them is actually a mini project and will implement the objectives of the project as a whole: Science and Technology, Art and Music, ICT and Social and Environmental Sustainability In each mini project the following cross-curricular competencies will be promoted: Critical Thinking Competency, Personal and Social Competency and Communication Competency.Each mini project will be implemented during a semester, and the last activity will be a transnational meeting. The activities within the project are based on the didactic methods 'Design Thinking' (Case method) and ‘Collaborative Learning’ (Inclusive school method). As the project focuses on pupils’ involvement to improve their transversal competences and skills, the guiding principle that we intend to apply will be the integration of the project into the school curriculum. Along with the integration of the project in the teaching/learning activities, getting the support of the staff and the school management team is a guarantee of success. At the completion of the project, as a consequence of the adoption of collaborative methodologies in school organization, teachers and students will be aware of the importance of working together to reach the same goals, and to improve relationships in school life. In addition to this, teachers will have gained knowledge on transversal competences and skills, will have applied their transversal competences and skills knowledge in their lessons and will have learned and practiced collaborative and team work techniques to promote an inclusive education. On the other hand, students will have researched and worked in a cross-cultural setting, will have an opinion on what makes the different subjects profitable and the added value of cultural formation in society, will have a knowledge of career possibilities in the different subjects sector, and will have identified several possibilities to use their knowledge to improve their possibilities of employability.
Unmotivated students are a reality that teachers face nowadays. Unmotivated attitude toward learning and frustration sometimes comes when they should learn subjects that seem to have no relevance to real life. This also leads to under achievement and often to dropping out of school. Our project helped the students to apply their theoretical school knowledge to practical work and to improve their 21st century skills. This project used inclusive methodologies, based on team and collaborative work, with activities that will lead to changes in their motivation for study and self-improvement. Concerning the teachers, methodologies leading to a creative education have been used, inclusive strategies such as: taking approaches to welcoming diversity; problem-solving methods; learner-centered teaching; interactive teaching and learning; collaborative learning.. all these to improve students' skills. Then, concerning the objetives we have: - Promoted the international scope of our school and community, offering interaction with people from other countries. - Promoted innovative educational strategies using methods of teaching to deal with the different abilities, interests and expectations of our pupils. - Improved in all the participants 21st century skills, such as language and digital skills (ICT), creativity autonomy, innovation and self-confidence. - Developed teamwork and collaboration between teachers of different subjects. - Improved the interaction between families, teachers and pupils aimed to solve common problems. - Acknowledged the competences and qualifications achieved by the participants in the mobilities, using official school certificates. - Strengthened emotional skills in all areas of personality and relationships with others. - Enhanced creativity and critical thinking in teachers and students so that they can face challenges successfully. The schools involved have been I.I.S Primo Levi in Italy, IESO Quercus in Spain, The Weald Community School in UK and the RSG Slingerbos|Levant in the Netherlands. The Italian school is a big school with a big variety of students. the presence of many foreign students who come to their region and start learning in their school, often without knowing the Italian language, have permitted them to develop the school’s skills in the teaching process. The English school offers many exciting opportunities for all students. Its innovative practice, combining contemporary research with traditional methods in the classroom, leads to a record of excellent examination results. The Dutch school has a bilingual stream in English, . ICT in teaching has been embedded for years,and new teaching methodologies are applied. Finally, the Spanish school has experience in collaborative work. New teaching/learning methodologies are very present in the Spanish school concerns. Then, the activities carried out in this project have been: - A transnational meeting for starting the project. - 4 mini-project challenges based on Science and Technology, Sustainability, Music, Arts & Literacy and Maths & ICT - Four short-term exchanges of group of pupils, based on the mini-project carried out (one of them has been in our own country), which have allowed students work out a challenge and participate in different activities in a foreign country, incorporating their families in it and have helped teachers see and show different approaches for teaching. -20 Long-term mobilites for pupils, which allowed some pupils spend 2/3 months in another country. As a result of this project we had: - 4 booklets from every mini-project (mentioned above) and 16 good practice example presentations as results of all the activities carried out in the project. In every booklet we have 12 or more lessons on teaching transversal skills using collaborative methods for different subjects (Maths, Geography, Business, Arts, Music, Technology, Science, Foreign Languages, Language and Literature). They've been incorporated into our official programming - 2 brochures, one for every two meetings, to compile the most important contents concerning the implementation of the project. - 4 solved challenges worked out in the meetings. - An Etwinning platform (https://twinspace.etwinning.net/29304/home) - A website where all the results, experiences, videos... are posted. (https://towardsutopia.wixsite.com/utopia) - A questionnaire/survey on measuring the students level of transversal competences, after participating in the project. The impact has been significant: - students have improved their XXI century skills and those immersed in family life abroad have developed their social, emotional, intellectual and language skills. - teachers have become more flexible in teaching, adapting methodologies. - families and the local community have experienced cultural differences and similarities - the schools involved will continue working towards the utopia in teaching proposed in this project.