As the world is changing towards a competitive form in all cases of life, education becomes more important than ever with its potential to prepare the learners to these challenges. Due to the growing demand for the best of everything, students have to acquire the synthesis of both the technical and pedagogical and soft skills such as collaboration, communication, critical and creative thinking, in order to be successful in school, work and the whole life. European Comission report, "Rethinking Education" underlines that European education and training systems continue to fail in providing the right skills for employability for young people, and are not working properly with the reality of the working environment. In the case of VET students who will directly enter the workforce after graduation, the balance of the skills gains much more importance. In this respect VET teachers have much more responsibility of gaining these skills to their students by integrating the skills to their courses. In order for the VET teachers to achieve this goal, they themselves have to be aware of the importance of these skills in their students’ success. In the light of these motivations, our project aims to develop modules and training courses to equip VET teachers with the competency in coaching their students to make them able - to process any information in order to reach a viable solution, - to express themselves properly and build fruitful relationships in their working environments , - to put forward original ideas for variety of problems, - to work together in harmony and compromise on critical issues for the success of the team, - to reach useful and reliable information, whenever needed. To reach mentioned outcomes, project activities will be implemented in following methodology::At first stage, an assessment tool will be developed by partners in order to investigate the knowledge and perceptions of VET teachers about the key skills needed for the labour market. The scale will be applied to the VET teachers of all partner countries.Results of these analyses will be base for Training ProgrammeAfter that, training modules will be tailored according to this training program. Training program and modules will be innovative outputs through using learner centered methods and interactive tools such as games, case problems, puzzles and role playings.After accomplishment of modules, they will be tested in pilot trainings to be held in each partner country. These pilots will be good oppurtunity to assees outputs and have the feedbacks of target groups.Besides, workshops to be held in each partner country will be good oppurtunity to introduce project outputs to target audiences who are VET teachers, professionals, labour market representatives and other stakeholdersAll these achievements will be implemented by a complimentary consortium with 2 Public Education Authorities, 2 Universities and 2 Private Research and Training Companies strongly linked with VET institutions.Project consortium has also huge dissemination and exploitation capacity with large network of VET institutions, universities, national and international events, routine training courses, workshops and seminars of all partners.Finally, whole partnership has strong motivation to continue to use project results even after EU fund ends through Continious and In Service Training Courses for VET teachers in the body of partner organizations.
As of the first part, the Project targeted to reveal existing Key Skills knowledge and perception of VET teachers which corresponds to Output 1: Development and Implementation of the Assessment Tool for Key Skill Knowledge and Perceptions of VET Teachers In order to investigate the knowledge and perceptions of VET teachers about the key skills needed for the 21st century, a draft questionnaire was developed by Gazi University after a detailed literature review and experts views before the kick-off in Pamplona. Before preparing the items of the questionnaire, five factors according to literature review and expert views; critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and innovation, collaboration and teamwork, social and environmental sustainability were created. After the items were created according to the factors specified, the draft questionnaire was translated into English and was discussed in the kick-off meeting with the whole partners face to face. According to all partner views in the meeting, the items of the questionnaire were updated and then a time of one week were decided for all the partners to revise and send back their final reviews in order to prepare the final version of the pilot questionnaire. Taking into account the conditions of the whole partner countries’ teachers (holiday, end of the semester, accessibility of the teachers etc.); 15 teachers from Spain, Portugal and Latvia and 50 teachers from Turkey VET teachers were decided to implement the pilot questionnaire in the meeting. Following the final views from all partners after one week from the kick-off meeting, the final version of the pilot questionnaire was translated into English again and was sent back to all partners to be translated into their languages. After the translation to Spanish, Portuguese, Latvian and Turkish, the pilot implementation was done by all partners. In order to receive the responses of VET teachers in the same format; a sample excel form was prepared by Gazi University with instructions and was sent to all partners to fill in their data they received from their pilot implementation. All partners sent back their filled excel forms, which were transferred into SPSS program by Gazi University in order to analyze the questionnaire forms to prepare the final questionnaire. According to the exploratory factor analysis, items the construct validity of which were completed were placed in the final version of the questionnaire. The Cronbach Alpha internal consistency coefficient was calculated as 0,89 which shows that the reliability of the data is high. The final version of the questionnaire was completed after the analyses. The questionnaire was applied to VET teachers; 30 from Spain, 29 from Portugal, 41 from Latvia and 147 from Turkey. Similarly, the data were filled into the excel forms and sent back to Gazi University. The analysis and the results presented, the draft training program for VET teachers that was presented to all partners in the second meeting in Riga, Latvia. After the Riga meeting Gazi University sent the draft of the Training program to partners. All partners provided feedback on the draft program till November 13-17, 2017: Then skype session was organized at the end of the November to discuss the content of the programme. The website www.skills4vet.eu established to have different login options for different users according to their role in the project activities. The project website content translated into partner languages. All partners provide the translations and sent to the coordinator ABIDINPASA. Before the the Portugal meeting all training programs ere sent to all partners . In this meeting, a very detailed discussion on the whole program has been made with special emphasis on deciding the “objectives”. The objectives of the training programs have been compromised by all the partners at the end of the meeting. According to all partners’ feedback on the training programs and deciding on the basis of modules that are “objectives” all partners decided to work on the modules altogether. The modules were developed by modifying and adding extra parts (activities) to the training programs. All partners sent their preparations and after one week’s examination on each other’s preparations a Skype meeting was organized in the second week of February (February 12). At the end of February all modules had been completed. After all the training programs and modules had been decided, training programs started to be implemented in Abidinpaşa and then in all partner institutions and last for 5 days and 6 hours in each day. Multiplier events as workshops head been organised in all partners' countries. Respectively Participants had been taken in workshops in Turkey to 95 participants, 93 participants in Spain, in Portugal 102 participants and 79 participants in Latvia. All the outputs were presented to the related stakeholders at those workshops.