1) Improving the professional and pedagogical skills of Kuopio upper secondary school teachers in their own subject and in cooperation with other teachers (joint teaching and cross-curricular cooperation) 2) Improving the English language skills of Kuopio upper secondary school teachers in their own subject and generally, especially in oral and written expression, as well as the teachers' skills in the internationalization of their own school. 3) Developing the skills of Kuopio upper secondary school teachers in creating and maintaining international networks and in implementing innovations generated in networks to promote the internationalization of upper secondary education in Kuopio according to the new upper secondary school act.
The city of Kuopio has goal to provide high quality primary education for the pupils and students in our city. Internationalism and offering opportunities for cross-national learning have been practically non-existent due to a lack of resources. In recent years, the city of Kuopio has been working together with the NEST Center to find solutions to this problem. We see this Erasmus KA1 teacher training project as a significant solution to keeping our city's teachers up to date. Promoting internationalism has been a challenge for our upper secondary education for a long time. Erasmus KA2 projects have highlighted a significant challenge from the teaching staff: There is clearly room for improvement in our teachers' oral and written English language skills. Effective international project work and implementation of the project activities requires strong language skills, which Finnish teacher training does not provide for anyone other than English language teachers. Both the teachers themselves and the principals brought up this challenge at the end of 2017, when our City Board began to consider solutions to the issue and started to plan an Erasmus KA1 teacher training project that would affect our entire upper secondary education field.