The purpose of this teacher training project has been to develop teachers' professional competence by attending international training courses in various European countries. The focus was on improving teaching methods, integration of different subjects, developing teachers' professional and emotional skills, learning to know European culture and local sights and also enhancing international co-operation. Another important objective was also to improve teachers' language skills and thus make it easier to take part in international projects. Finding new partners for international projects during the courses is important as well.
When planning to apply for this project the teaching staff of our upper secondary school in Hyvinkää was facing several challenges due to requirements of the new national curriculum (LOPS 21), and adjusting our teaching capacity to the new Hyvinkään lukio combining the previous two smaller school units of Hyvinkään Sveitsin lukio and Hyvinkään Yhteiskoulun lukio in August 2020. Starting to co-operate with new colleagues and teaching a wide variety of students in large groups demands also soft skills and emotional intelligence. All in all, the needs for teachers' supplementary training have constantly increased, especially because of the final exams using ICT equipment in Finnish upper secondary schools. Furthermore, our school has a profile of natural sciences, which requires a continuous development of teachers' professional competence so that we could offer our students good and up-to-date education also in the future. This is one of the reasons why so many teachers were interested in joining this educational project in order to get new ideas and skills for our developing and planning assignment. There were 13 teachers of various subjects who were interested in attending courses: one native language (Finnish) teacher, four foreign language teachers, one biology and geography teacher, two history and social studies teachers, one chemistry teacher, one art teacher and three physics and mathematics teachers.