With a significant rate of 18.4% youth unemployment across EU and a rising total flow of 3.4 million people immigrating to one of the EU-28 Member States, the importance of high quality of VET provisions to support and sustain economic growth at both national and European level calls for innovative actions. The project “ Empowering VET Teachers – Innovative & Enhanced CPD for Newly Qualified VET Teachers Working with Migrant Students” is an innovative and transnational undertaking that contributes to overall objectives of Europe 2020 in which it has been identified that VET systems should be attractive and inclusive with highly qualified VET teachers equipping learners with both key competences and specific vocational skills. VET teachers act as social agents contributing to the development of the skilled workforce that is crucial for the EU to compete globally, foster social inclusion and sustain its high living standards. The project overall objective is to improve the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of newly qualified VET teachers working with students from variety of ethnic backgrounds after their induction period, therefore impacting the inclusion within the classroom environment and consequently the economic and social empowerment of disadvantage groups of young people. More specifically, the project contributes to strengthening the induction process of newly qualified VET teachers working with migrant students and therefore enhancing inclusive classroom environment by: 1. Providing newly qualified VET teachers with an online diagnostic tool assessing their professional skills and identifying the areas of improvement ensuring further, relevant, based on their individual needs CPD 2. Up-skilling newly qualified VET teachers with soft skills methods and tools fostering inter-cultural communication and competences, increasing participation and learning performance of disadvantaged learners and combating discrimination, racism, bullying 3. Equipping newly qualified VET teachers with digital guides on increasing social inclusion within classroom environment with use of training scenarios of interactive, project-based learning activities ready for immediate classroom implementation. All solutions will be developed by 7 partners from Italy, Spain, Cyprus, Bulgaria & Poland that collectively represent balanced mix of skills and expertise. In order to establish cross-sector collaboration, the partners include vocational/educational training providers, non-profit organizations and private enterprises. All partners engage with VET teachers and leaders having strong links with various educational and youth institutions as well as businesses. They also have extensive experience of management and implementation of local, national and/or European projects. Therefore, the background of the partners will ensure that the project is implemented efficiently and professionally as well as inclusive of European perspective. The project activities will benefit 1,465 stakeholders including young people, VET leaders, newly qualified VET teachers working with migrant students, VET policy makers and partners’ internal staff members resulting in the significant increase in: - The knowledge and confidence of use of social inclusion didactic methods by newly qualified VET teachers - Increased motivation of the newly qualified VET teachers for professional training and skills development - The gained insights and benefits for external stakeholders and partners The above benefits for 1,465 stakeholders will increase teaching effectiveness and improve teaching quality leading to a higher students' success and increased social inclusion within classroom environment allowing VET teachers to act as key agents in the process of creating inclusive society. As a result, the overall image and functioning of the VET organisations will be improved fulfilling the criteria of Europe 2020 acting as attractive and inclusive VET systems resulting in better trained and more active people, which would increase the possibility of development and increasing of the local markets and its competitiveness. The involvement of partners’ organisations and the direct involvement of the interested stakeholders will improve their understanding on more innovative and modern tools in the field of teaching resulting in overall improved view on teaching profession and therefore making teaching an attractive career-choice.
The project "Empowering VET Teachers – Innovative & Enhanced CPD for Newly Qualified VET Teachers Working with Migrant Students" (acronym e-VET) concerns VET education. In the EU, a high quality of VET has been recognized as one of the elements that support economic growth. At the same time, the rate of youth unemployment across EU is high: in 2019 17.7% for aged 15-19 and 14.0% for aged 15-24, what combined with 4.5 million people immigrating in 2018 to UE put pressure on the EU economies, and potentially could be eased by efficiently provided VET. In most countries participating in CPD it is required from teachers to develop competences needed to work in a multicultural environment. Therefore, the e-VET project focused on increasing the VET teachers' effectiveness by developing their soft skills. Project objectives were to: 1. Provide newly qualified VET teachers with an online diagnostic tool assessing their professional skills and identifying the areas of improvement ensuring further, relevant, based on their individual needs CPD. 2. Up-skill newly qualified VET teachers with soft skills methods and tools fostering inter-cultural communication and competences, increasing participation and learning performance of disadvantaged learners, and combating discrimination, racism, bullying. 3. Equip newly qualified VET teachers with digital guides on increasing social inclusion within the classroom environment with the use of training scenarios of interactive, project-based learning activities ready for immediate classroom implementation. Outputs of the project are combined in one integrated product – developed in the project e-learning platform https://platform.e-vetproject.eu/ consisted of: - an online diagnostic test assessing soft skills (Diagnostic Tool - DT), that enables teachers working with migrant students or in another multicultural environment to assess their professional skills in 5 key competences: ethics and professionalism, management of the multicultural environment, teamwork, communication, and critical thinking & problem-solving skills. Results of the diagnosis are in form of evaluation that helps to identify the areas which are still to be improved. - MOOC incorporated into e-learning platform that equips teachers with digital guides on increasing social inclusion within the classroom environment by developing their competencies previously assessed with DT. Based on e-learning course text, presentations, videos, as well as online quizzes, and additional materials in 5 modules, teachers can develop in ethics and professionalism, management of the multicultural environment, teamwork, communication, and critical thinking & problem-solving skills. These modules are related to competences examined by DT to assure the homogeneity and complexity of the project results. The e-learning platform https://platform.e-vetproject.eu/ provides both gamification elements (Badges, Quizzes), and reporting features for the users to be able to monitor their progress. This e-learning platform and its content is available in 6 languages: English, Bulgarian, Greek, Italian, Polish, Spanish. The main target group of E-VET project are therefore newly qualified VET teachers working in intercultural classes. During course of the project also other stakeholders like VET students, participants of vocational colleges, board of educations, teacher development centers, adult education centers, schools and trainers were involved and supported the project with their feedback during pilot testing and seminars. 140 participants were engaged in the testing of the Diagnostic Tool, 40 in the platform testing and 207 in the testing of the MOOC. In traditional and online seminars 229 people from different countries were involved. The participation of teachers of different ages and experiences, as well as from different culture allowed to create a product understandable as a language, to balance the difficulty of the questions and the fairness of the assessment. Although the outputs were prepared for newly qualified VET teachers working in intercultural classes, the platform may be useful to other groups like teachers and trainers of any sector. The project has a European dimension. Offering a full cycle of initial assessment, training modules and three levels of assessment it allows the opportunity to increase teachers’ motivation to work with new knowledge and skills, to improve the effectiveness of teaching using what they have learned and to overcome previously insurmountable obstacles. The acquired knowledge will facilitate their work in a multicultural environment, preventing school dropouts and the social inclusion of migrant students, improving specific ICT skills for working with e-learning platforms and transferring them into schools, especially in pandemics and distance learning. Project results can be also used by teachers on different levels of education. Its online formula allows accessing all interested stakeholders.