Today’s school science education is faced with a number of interrelated obstacles like the lack of relevance between what is taught in school and everyday life, the tight curricula which do not allow for practical implementation, reflection and consolidation of knowledge as well as the outdated teaching methods that leave little room to students for enjoyment and a search for meaning. Students are deprived of the opportunity to become active learners and thus they are often unable to recall and apply their past knowledge in different settings. In addition due to such obstacles students often perceive science as dull, authoritarian and disconnected to their lives.PLATON aims to address these problems, by motivating teachers to update their teaching practices and bring inspiration into their science classroom, increase students’ interest in science and focus on developing students’ basic skills in math and science as well as 21st century key skills, like critical and creative thinking.The PLATON project approaches science learning not as a decontextualized activities focused on the memorization of factual knowledge organized in a linear progression but as an approach that allows the generation of knowledge through a creative, constructive process that builds upon students’ prior understanding and evolves beyond what is explicitly taught. To this end, PLATON will build a methodology that combines the Inquiry Based Science Teaching Approach with the ‘Big Ideas of Science’ scheme for introducing interdisciplinary learning. This combination can produce a powerful blended approach that can enable teachers to build bridges between the science classroom and the world around us, rethink the way they perceive the science curriculum and take advantage of opportunities to introduce hands-on and minds-on activities for their students.The objective of the PLATON project is to facilitate teachers’ professional development and build their competences so as to enable them to shift towards a student-centred teaching style that combines successfully inquiry learning with interdisciplinary teaching in an integrated blended approach. More particularly, PLATON aims to:• Introduce to teachers the IBSE approach so that it allows them to identify its separate components, incorporate them progressively in their teaching style and move towards a student-centred teaching approach;• Pinpoint the added value of interdisciplinary learning and introduce the ‘Big Ideas of Science’ as a common backbone structure that allows students to make connections between principles and phenomena they learn in different science disciplines;• Produce an integrated blended approach that harmonically combines inquiry and interdisciplinary learning and introduces these components in everyday teaching thus allowing teachers to focus on increasing students interest in science and further developing basic and 21st century skills;• Train teachers to become active practitioners of the PLATON blended approach and become PLATON ambassadors by organizing training sessions for more teachers;• Build a set of MOOC training courses for teachers that ensures the sustainability of the project and the use of the PLATON methodology by teachers from all over the world even beyond the lifetime of the project;• Involve students and teachers into interdisciplinary, inquiry-based, hands-on activities that simulate real-life challenges;• Foster collaboration between teachers of the same school and encourage them to work as a team by providing a common framework that overarches science curricula and remains unaffected by changes that may occur in them;In order to achieve these objectives we aim to start by building the PLATON teacher training methodology including the necessary tools, guidelines, examples of use and assessment tools. School units from the six participating counties will be invited to training events and then put the PLATON methodology in practice. PLATON teachers will have the opportunity to become PLATON ambassadors by receiving additional training for materializing teacher training workshops themselves. The project team aims to collect input and findings from the training events and the pilot implementations, review them and produce an updated final version our framework, along with a ‘PLATON schools portfolio’ presenting best test cases from the participating schools and the ‘PLATON roadmap towards innovation’ handbook.The project aims to reach 150 teachers and 3000 students through training and implementation and 10.000 teachers and 30.000 students through dissemination events. To achieve that, the project aims to make numerous presentations and workshops in conferences and other related events reaching not only teachers but also educational stakeholders. In addition, the project aims to make use of all Erasmus+ tools like Key Activity 1 mobility grants for teachers and make liaisons with other European projects that share similar objectives.
PLATON project was born from a partnership between six partners from six European countries (Portugal, Greece, United Kingdom, Cyprus, Spain and Finland) devoted to teacher training and innovation in education, whose goal was to create a teacher training framework that would introduce Inquiry and Interdisciplinarity to teachers in a progressive, step-by-step and effective way. The idea was to reach the gap between training methods and teachers' real needs, transforming these innovative methodologies into something accessible, easy to implement and even an enjoyable experience for teachers. For this purpose, a new methodology was created, called WIIL - Working with Interdisciplinarity and Inquiry-Based Learning, under which several materials were created. First, in order to establish a collaborative and interdisciplinary framework in the school setting, the "3D Interdisciplinary Map of Science Ideas" was created taking into consideration the revision of the curricula topics of the six involved countries and including information about the different subject domains and grade levels where they are taught. This map creates a bridge between the topics taught in science disciplines and the Big Ideas of Science, providing teachers with a simple tool to establish connections between what they teach and what other teachers teach as well as with students' daily lives. Second, a tool called "Inquiry Under the Microscope toolkit" was created. This tool breaks down inquiry into a series of 9 components that describe in detail the most important attitudes that teachers needs integrate in their practice in order to shift from traditional methods to inquiry-based learning. Using this tool, teachers find a comfortable and progressive step by step change towards inquiry without feeling insecure or too much out of their comfort zone. Third, a set of materials and guidelines were created to allow teachers and educators to train others in the use of the materials and to integrate any part of WIIL in the teaching practice. Additionally, a set of already-made activities was created to demonstrate to teachers how to use WIIL in the framework of stand-alone projects, following a seven-step inquiry cycle. Finally, a set of assessment tools called "Deep-Learning assessment toolkit" was created to allow teachers to assess their students when implementing WIIL considering 21st century skills and deep-learning. During the timeline of the project, 258 teachers from 99 schools used at least one part of WIIL, reaching over 5150 students. Of these, 144 teachers implemented full methodology, creating an e-portfolio and providing feedback to refine the final materials and tools. These received an international recognition as PLATON teachers. Furthermore, 61 schools received a recognition as PLATON School. In these schools, at least three PLATON teachers worked together implementing the full methodology, with the exception of the schools in the non-partner countries where in some cases only 1 teacher implemented the full methodology due to fewer support opportunities to create an interdisciplinary approach in the school. Overall, teachers provided very important feedback for the improvement of the materials and reported a very positive result from the implementation of WIIL. More specifically, most teachers stated that the 3D Map was easy to use and allowed them to establish more connections between topics, to integrate interdisciplinarity in their practice and to synchronize the teaching of related topics with their colleagues. Teachers also perceived that the use of the Big Ideas of Science helped their students to better understand science as a whole. Almost all teachers reported that the Inquiry Components where helpful for their practice and that using WIIL helped their students to achieve their learning objectives. The teachers that implemented the PLATON activities reported that their students appeared to be more engaged and motivated during their implementation than usual. Furthermore, an impact evaluation survey was created for all teachers that implemented the project. The preliminary analysis of this survey allowed us to conclude that, in general, teachers felt secure using WILL, reporting that it improved their lessons, making them more confident using Interdisciplinarity and Inquiry, increasing their motivation for teaching and discovering a better relationship with their colleagues. Teachers also reported to have experienced a better interaction with their students who seemed more motivated and engaged, showing a more positive attitude towards science. Given such positive impact of WIIL both in teachers and in students, the project consortium has decided to keep the methodology alive, promoting further teacher training courses and integrating all the materials in further projects, even after the end of the funding of the project. Future perspectives are alive and the project will continue to be used and enriched.