Teachers and trainers’ professional development continues to be a high priority on the EU policy agenda. In 2010, the Bruges communiqué (2010) invited Member States to invest in VET teachers and trainers by offering flexible training provision. The Riga conclusions (2015) have put renewed emphasis on the issue, calling for more systematic approaches and better cooperation and partnerships. There is a need of competences from VET providers on how to set up innovative Work-based learning methodologies to prepare students for their future occupation thus improving their employability when leaving the school. In particular, the staff of VET providers need to become more acquainted with organising WBL experiences in mobility, because they allow students to acquire key competences and professional competences at once, apart from contributing to their personal development. Therefore, more training opportunities for the staff operating in VET providers have to be created in order to gain competences on WBL in mobility and share best practices. Starting from the needs and listed above, the partners of "Work-Based Learning Summer School" will exchange best practices with the general objective of increasing the quality and internationalisation of WBL in Europe by delivering an innovating training methodology for the CPD of VET teachers. The specific objectives are: 1. To improve competences of VET teachers/trainers on how to plan, organise and evaluate high quality WBL experiences in mobility 2. To exchange practices in teacher training on WBL and internationalisation, and thus identify, test and mainstream an innovative training methodology. 3. To improve networking and communication skills in VET provider staff to develop Internationalization strategies together with stakeholders. The partnership is composed by 7 organisation from 7 European countries each of them specialized in a particuar aspect related to WBL and mobility. The best practices exchange and the know-how of each organization will shape a prototype of a summer school that will be tested during the project. In order to create the summer school, the partners will be: -Collecting best practices concerning WBL and methodologies/pedagogical approach to prepare WBL experiences in their country and abroad; -Researching and developing innovative tools aimed at empowering teachers by experimenting an intercultural environment, developing their own intercultural competences and exchanging about the companies’ working culture in the different countries -Defining and piloting the training program of a five days summer school: 2 days : Instruments to prepare students about intercultural environment 2 days: Tools to manage a learning mobility project and to validate VET competences developed abroad by the students 1 day: instrument to prepare students to face WBL experiences (including study visits in companies and working groups) - Testing the summer school in Italy (June 2018) and in France (July 2019) with up to 40 teachers in order to collect feedbacks about the output developed. Projects activities will unfold in: - Coordination meetings every 6 months to research, design, organize and pilote the logistical and pedagogical aspects of the summer school - Short term joint staff trainings will be the used to test the summer school. They will be organised once per year in Italy and in France and will be the occasion for teachers to meet, exchange practices and be trained on how to innovate WBL by including intercultural learning and European mobility opportunities. - Dissemination activities will be arranged in every country to present the result of the summer school to other stakeholders and practitioners at local level, and therefore multiply the impact. This activity will improve the impact of the project and its quality thanks to the direct involvement of local stakeholders which will provide feedbacks and possibly support the activities. At the end of the project the partnership is expected to deliver a format, methodology and brand for a summer school which is aimed at training VET teachers on innovative WBL approaches, centred around the importance of exchanging best practices on work-based learning, mobility and intercultural competences.
Teachers and trainers’ professional development continues to be a high priority on the EU policy agenda. In 2010, the Bruges communiqué (2010) invited Member States to invest in VET teachers and trainers by offering flexible training provision. The Riga conclusions (2015) have put renewed emphasis on the issue, calling for more systematic approaches and better cooperation and partnerships. There is a need of competences from VET providers on how to set up innovative Work-based learning methodologies to prepare students for their future occupation thus improving their employability when leaving the school. In particular, the staff of VET providers need to become more acquainted with organising WBL experiences in mobility, because they allow students to acquire key competences and professional competences at once, apart from contributing to their personal development. With this regard peer learning has showed to be a powerful method for exchanging knowledge and experience and possibly speed up the development process. Work based learning summer schools project brought together 7 partners, including 5 VET Providers (Hetel, Insignare, SPTS, EUGES, AOCDTF) and two mobility expert (Uniser and Efil) from 7 countries (Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium) that had a common shared concern: to improve work based learning and mobility of learners by upscaling the VET provider competences and internationalisation. The final aim of WBL summer schools was to exchange good practices among project partners, related to teacher training on work-based learning and internationalisation of VET schools with the purpose of develop a model of a European ‘summer school’ for the professional continuous development of teachers/educators operating in VET providers on these themes. The mixed composition of the partnership allowed to have multiple point of view and develop a comprehensive approach to student learning mobility projects that covered all the main aspects: writing, planning, managing, monitoring, organising, assessing and enhancing intercultural learning. The resulting methodology has been based on role games, experiential and peer learning working activities in order to put the teachers and practitioners in the student shoes and boost mutual understanding among participants. From November 2017 to October 2019 the project unfolded into the creation of an innovative teacher training methodology that was initially built on the partners best practices. The 5 days summer school training format was piloted for the first time in Bologna (June 2018) and afterwards it has been reworked based on the participants and trainers feedbacks. A second edition took place one year later in La Rochelle (July 2019). After the second piloting the final format of the WBL summer school has been delivered. Together with the training methodology partnership conceived the Mobiliteach brand with the aim to further develop teacher trainings based on the same content (learning mobility abroad) and methodology and reunite all of them under the brand in order to be easily identifiable as high quality teacher trainings. An ad hoc website has been created to maximise the impact and reach as many VET provider as possible. It contains all information about the project and training materials which are freely downloadables without any limitation. The website www.mobiliteach.net has been conceived also to bring together the complete Mobiliteach teacher training offer that organisations inside and outside of the partnership are developing. The project had a relevant impact on: - VET teachers and staff that increased their competences on writing, planning, managing and organising WBL experiences and gained intercultural learning competences. - VET providers that increased their level of internationalisation and the upscale their VET provision thanks to the competences and skills acquired by their staff - Mobility experts gained a deeper understating on the VET system of the participating countries - All organisation reached with dissemination that got interested or are already participating to new Mobiliteach projects. The project in the long run will contribute to increase the offer of high quality WBL experience abroad to VET students and therefore enhance young people employability. Upscale of VET teachers competences and their increased awareness on the importance of. work-based learning experiences will also indirectly support work-based learning validation of competences and its integration in the students curricula.