Our most important goal was to connect with interested colleagues internationally. That was the reason why we tried to cover various subjects through the participating teachers, thus trying to assure that upon returning from the different visits through dissemination an ever larger group of colleagues could profit from the chosen few actually having participated. It was all about circulating best practice ideas we would come across at different schools abroad, ideas we would brainstorm for their feasibility with the colleagues participating, and presenting possibilities to our school’s leaders to implement. We wanted to learn about different learning environments and about the education of teachers, about tools available in other schools to keep the students going or feed them additional knowledge and to help them develop cultural awareness so to make them open-minded for the exciting possibilities that are out there and available to them. Doing all this through travelling to other European countries and working on our personal cultural awareness made the whole project even more alluring.
With nearly 1600 students our school is home to different ethnicities and different abilities – making sure that none of the students we are entrusted with is left behind for any reason, we were on the lookout for further available methods and ideas. We are aware of other European countries going about teacher trainings in a different way, and we wanted to learn from those colleagues. So, the possibilities for job shadowing at different schools in different countries was what we were interested in, Erasmus+ offering exactly that. Through this we hoped to be able to see best practice ideas and be able to take them home into our classrooms, present them to our fellow teachers, but also bring our own best practice ideas to the schools we visited. We were also keen on exchanging different ideas and debating their feasibility in the context of different schools, different curricula, different national limits and expectations with other open-minded teachers interested in the same goal. Our key needs obviously are to assure our students’ wellbeing. All of us strive to make sure no student is left behind, but instead feed them with the knowledge and abilities they need to possess in order to cope with an ever changing, globalized world.