1. Acquiring knowledge and developing skills, e.g. communicative, linguistic, personal (student relationships management). 2. Exchange of practices with experience from other educational systems in common matters. 3. Improving teaching with new techniques, using new technologies. 4. Enhancing understanding and tolerance of diversity, realizing diversity as the driving force of Europe in the 21st century schools; emphases on European values, such as democracy, solidarity, equal participation in learning, multilingualism, equal opportunities. 5. Learning Objectives: Teachers develop their skills first as learners and then help their own students so that they learn more actively. 6. Through the interaction with teachers from other European countries a cooperation network could be created which would contribute against isolation and thus would create a sense of community (first European and then a school one), where everyone works together with common goals.
We submitted this proposal aspiring to improve/upgrade the role of teachers with a series of structured courses aiming at supporting their work by -firstly- providing them with the skills to manage the phenomenon of burnout syndrome and the crises that arise in school life. Teaching staff had to learn to work together and join their forces in order to develop effective strategies to tackle the negative phenomenon of school violence (bullying). Teachers should be willing to innovate and familiarize themselves with practices that make their lessons more attractive. They should be guided to adopt new teaching methods with the safe use of technology (advanced tools and techniques that can be incorporated in the classroom, social media and new Web platforms for education). Moreover, they should be encouraged to work with people, institutions and organizations of the wider educational community making the most of the experiences gained. We aimed to “bring" Europe to Rodopi - Greece - and vice versa.