Learning Schools is addressing a common problem within the educational systems of most European countries – the loss of knowledge and expertise with teacher retirement, attrition and migration. Most schools do not have any mechanisms for knowledge capturing, synthesising and sharing within the organisation or others use only separate tools, which are not organised as an efficient system. The aim of our transnational team of experts is to enhance individual, team and organisational learning in schools. The direct target group of the project is school principals, school leaders and teachers from Bulgaria, Spain, Italy and Turkey. In order to achieve the project’s goals we are creating the first knowledge management system and platform for schools in the participants’ countries, which will contain a set of synchronised tools. The project will be developed in the framework of the learning organisation and schools as learning organisations, which has integrated most of the achievements of the management thought for the last 25 years. The diverse cultural, economic and educational context of all the countries will allow for rich country specific analyses of the characteristics of the learning schools in each country, the best practices they apply and the existing level of knowledge management. All the findings will lead to the development of an integrated model of learning schools (MLS), an elaborate assessment instrument for comparison of the achievements of all the users of the platform and the existing best practices. The country specific analyses will feed examples for the knowledge management system, which we are devising as well. All these tools will be synchronised on a platform, which will make them user-friendly and accessible for school principals and school leadership at large. The platform will lead to the development of learning community of schools network. All the registered users will be able to share best practices and expertise. The expected impact of the project is beyond the borders of the applicants’ countries. The integrated interactive resources will be available in English, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish and Turkish languages. It is an innovative contribution on national, regional and EU level. All the findings and outcomes of the project will benefit researchers and policy makers with instruments for enhancement of the educational systems reforms. All the instruments integrated in the platform and the platform itself will be tested in several schools in each of the participants’ countries. The schools are selected to have good digital equipment, but incomplete knowledge management set of instruments. The piloting stage will provide significant and contextual feedback from the direct target group in each country. The platform and the instruments integrated it will be fine-tuned and improved afterwards in order to become intuitive and user friendly. The participants in the piloting stage are school leaders and teachers. A series of dissemination events are planned in each country in order to popularise the outcomes among the target group and the relative stakeholders. Two types of events will be conducted – national one in Bulgaria and regional in all other countries. In long term perspective, the project goal is to support the ongoing educational reforms in EU countries as it raises awareness about the need to capture, synthesise, share and asses knowledge on organisational level and will prove the benefits of that.
Our goal was to launch a debate on the importance of school organisational development and change management as crucial part of the ongoing educational reforms in all countries. The objectives of the project are: On school level: - to provide school leaders with an innovative and customised solution for organisational learning and knowledge exchange within the organisation; - to enhance teacher motivation and continuous professional development ensuring the transfer of knowledge from individual teacher to school team or to organisation; - to make teachers career more attractive and to reduce migration and attrition rate through involvement and shared leadership; - to enhance the transformation of schools into learning organisations focused on the inclusion of all children; On system level: - to create a network of collaborating learning schools through the project platform; - to operationalise the concepts of the schools as learning organisations and knowledge management in education and prepare practical tools for its achievement; - to bring awareness among educational stakeholders for the benefits of learning on organisational level;
Learning Schools project is addressing a common problem within the educational systems of Bulgaria, Spain, Italy and Turkey – the loss of knowledge and expertise with teacher retirement, attrition and migration. The larger context in which the problem is positioned is the one of organisational learning. We joined efforts to provide an innovative approach to increase the capacity of schools for managing the process of continuous professional development of teachers and linking its different phases, to establish a culture of innovation and to assist them in embedding systems for exchanging knowledge and learning within the organization and with the external environment. The direct target group of the project is school principals, school leaders and teachers from Bulgaria, Spain, Italy and Turkey. It addresses the following needs identified by all partners: - the loss of expertise and knowledge in the organisations due to teacher’s retirement, migration and attrition; - the lack of systematic solution for managing teacher professional development as part of the organizational shared vision and strategic development; - the lack of mechanisms and systems for capturing and sharing knowledge and learning on organizational level;