This association involves four Schools: IES Val Miñor as coordinator (Galicia, Spain); VilaKavickio r. Sudavos pagrindine mokykla (Lithuania), Istituto Compresivo Novara di Sicilia (Sicily, Italy) and Knox Academy (Scotland, UK). The aim is to develop a process of innovative teaching and learning involving teachers and students in a cooperative frame to prepare free teaching materials and resources. It is about to involve schools and communities in a real case studyand to go beyond the classroom and change behaviors as citizens. Students will participate in activities that will make possible to analyze critically the impact of their own life style on the planet. Students will suggest proposals to reduce the Ecological Footprint as well. Objectives:1) To develop an innovative process starting from a problem (What is your own impact on The Earth?) and carry out a process of cooperative teaching and learning experience to achieve European Union goals in education.2) To involve students in a real case study to analyze what kind and what amount of natural resources are supporting their life style and also supporting the school activity. Finally, to identify and find out the impact on the planet.3) To draw up different teaching materials that will be available to schools and European education system resources.4) To enhance linguistic competence, IT competence and social competence promoting active citizenship and working in a transnational context.Methodology:The project is based in two main m ethologies to use during the two kind of activities of teaching and learning:1) Problem Based Learning (PBL) to use at every school during the designed activities (C1, C3, C5, C7) that prepare the transnational context activities.2) Active methodology based in cooperative teaching and learning to develop for students and teachers during short students exchanges. (C2, C4, C6, C8)Activities:1. Transnational meeting. Initial teacher meeting to coordinate the activities, assessment and products.2. Four Short teaching and learning activities. Following the Problem Based learning each school team work and prepare drafts and documents. These documents will be discussed during the subsequent activities that gather the four schools together during short exchanges . Each activity has a real question to solve: How do you analyze impacts on the planet?(C1); Finding out your own impact: How much do I use? (C3); How much do school use? (C5); Thinking in the future (C7).3. Short Students Exchanges. Using active cooperative teaching and learning, teachers and students from the four school interact together and produce a final common transnational material.Non material Products:1. Promoting personal initiative and active roles in teaching and learning2. Changing behavior and consumption3. Improving linguistic competences and skills in multilingual contexts.4. Enhancing motivation and academic performance5. Progressing in teaching and learning6. Strengthening European perspectiveMaterial products:1. Teaching and learning guide: Teachers and students materials supporting resources (01).2. Project web and application to calculate the ecological footprint at school (O2).3. Brochures to disseminate the project (O3) 4. Exhibition about consumption habits (E2).Long term benefits:Final products and materials will be available in the project web site (O2) and in the educational resource banks of educational administrations. This will make possible that both us and new schools work in the future about the ecological footprint and guaranteeing the project sustainability.
“Cooperative Teaching and Learning to change behaviour: Ecological Footprint at school” is the name of this project which involves three schools, IES Val Miñor (Spain) in the role of coordinator, the Vilkaviskio r. Sudavos pagrindine morykla (Lithuania) and the Istituto Comprensivo Novara di Sicilia (Italy), in a collaborative, multi-lingual and transnational innovative experience. Goals: 1. Problem-based educational innovation from the start, which promotes autonomy and active roles in learning as well as making it possible to investigate, discover, draw and share conclusions within a framework of students teaching one another. 2. Promotion of sustainability by carrying out the analysis of those natural resources necessary to maintain the students’, as well as the schools’, standard of life and the impact of it all on our planet. 3. Training students to become critical citizens, responsible and sustainability-aware consumers. 4. Designing teaching materials to sustain the experience and enroll new schools which might be willing to track their own ecological footprint, while strengthening basic skills, such as the use of ICTs, the English language as a working tool, learning to learn, and the scientific method. The 12-15-year-old participant students, of very different profiles (curriculum, language skills, age, cultural context) have managed, through cooperation, to put together a common result to share with the school community. Activities: 1. Initial transnational teacher meeting in order to coordinate activities, establish the focus of the guidelines to be elaborated, define competences and evaluation criteria and design materials. 2. Short-term training activities for students, namely problem-based learning experiences carried out simultaneously in the three schools, each of them involving between 30-60 students and 2-6 teachers per school. Each activity addressed a problem, with the students looking for a solution, which would later be the basis for the short-term exchanges, and giving it shape (the outcome is on display on the project’s website). List of activities: Learning about Natural Resources (C1), Calculating our Impact: My Ecological Footprint (C3), What is the Surface of The Earth supporting my school activity? Preparing the future (C5). 3. Short-term student exchanges, during which students took part in group training activities, by means of an active methodology of cooperative work, in the transnational context. Students discussed the results of these activities and integrated them into common materials (available on the project’s website). List of activities: Learning about Natural Resources: The Ecological Footprint (C2), What do we do with our Planet? Global Footprint (C4), Our use of the Planet: The Footprint of our school. Materials for the Future (C6). 4. Other events and dissemination. All the activities, and their results, were presented to the local and educational community as well as to the media. Besides, an exhibition of the materials that graphically reports their conclusions and proposals was set up by the students themselves. The project website displays the work carried out, step by step. Intangibles: Promotion of self-initiative and participation; improvement of linguistic competence; improvement of performance and motivation; strengthening of multidisciplinary work and educational innovation; promotion of a European and sustainable awareness; changes in consumer behaviour and habits. Materials: Teacher and student guide including 40 didactic units specially designed for developing the activities; support teaching materials and project website; a mobile app for working out ecological footprint; brochures for the project dissemination; exhibition of project materials prepared by the students; presentations, brochures, reports on consumption of resources and reduction measures for families, too; reports and suggestions for ecological footprint tracking at schools. All of the stuff is displayed and available on the participant schools’ websites and on the project website http://coteachinglearning.eu/ The impact has been achieved through: 1. A significant breakthrough in collaborative work, in three schools with different realities, that has finally involved the whole school community. 2. The exchange of results among more than 1200 students. 3. The presentation of results to the families, citizens, other schools and municipalities. 4. Web availability of the finished project along with a guide and all the materials. In the long term, the sustainability of this experience will be possible through public access to the guide and the materials supporting it from the web http://coteachinglearning.eu/