1) English language skills; 2) use of innovative teaching methodologies and ICT; 3) management of internationalisation processes: these were the three main areas for intervention that at the beginning we identified as a high priority to enable our staff to take significant steps towards the European dimension of education and make our school more innovative. The main objective was to encourage staff to undertake new professional challenges in order to get out of their comfort zone to observe and experiment good practices, improve specific skills relevant to their own continuous professional development, establish fruitful partnerships with foreign partners and improve team working skills. Opening up to such a challenging working context implies becoming more keen to thinking outside the box to apply innovative teaching methodologies and strategies that mainly focus on learning by doing, putting aside the more traditional ways of teaching to motivate students with a more active, stimulating way of learning. Another main aim was to improve teamwork among colleagues by sharing good practices within the school community upon return from the mobility experience, in order to disseminate what was learnt during the training.
The idea of applying for our very first Erasmus+ KA1 project came from the urgent need to support the process of internationalisation undertaken by our school just a few years earlier: we agreed that orienting the professional development of our school staff towards the acquisition of specific skills and competences could be key to the successful implementation of the European Development Plan, as well as trigger a broader process of growth within the whole school community. Starting to work successfully on some eTwinning, Erasmus KA2 and CLIL projects had shown us a new, stimulating, engaging way of helping pupils develop key competences, but in order to make our school more international we were in need of a more consistent plan of action. What drove us was the firm belief that in order to initiate a true process of systemic change it was really important to involve our staff in European mobility activities so as to make them fully aware of how Innovation and Internationalisation, closely linked together, are indeed vital for enhancing an educational offer aimed at satisfying the needs of future 21st century citizens by combining together the local and global dimension.