As stated in the grant application form, the main goal of this project was to increase the professional and personal level of our teachers by creating opportunities for participation in a range of structured educational activities. We have defined the following needs as sub-goals of the project: • introduce new methods and forms of education into teaching; • increase the quality of education provided by our school; • develop basic skills and competences of students, contribute to increasing tolerance and acceptance of differences; • develop critical thinking; • communicate interculturally and cooperate with partners abroad; • improve the status and degree of inclusion of the Roma ethnic group in regular education. By participating in this project, we wanted to create a unique opportunity for personal and professional growth for our employees, students and, last but not least, their parents, which is essential in the sense of lifelong learning and can hardly be realized directly in the conditions of the school itself.
The motivation for the implementation of this project was primarily based on the analysis of general goals and needs that our school has defined in the European Development Plan. It is primarily a constant effort to work on supplementing the education and development of the professional skills of teachers and our qualification requirements, to improve their key competences, not only within the taught subjects, but also in the field of communication and the social level, and last but not least, to increase the quality of the school as an institution in city and region, which is directly related to the constantly increasing degree of its internationalization. We therefore know from the evaluation of the projects that one of the biggest benefits of educational activities is the social dimension of education, primarily because of the possibility to stay abroad, the necessity to communicate in a foreign language and the opportunities to establish new contacts. Based on the same presumptions, we decided to implement this project.