The diversity of our pupils shows a picture that nowadays not only poses new challenges for teachers in Germany, but also for schools all over Europe, even worldwide. The aim of our project was therefore to open up equal educational opportunities for children in the future, regardless of their background, individual learning requirements or support at home, and to do so in the course of globalisation, growing cultural diversity and a Europe that is increasingly growing together. In concrete terms, professionalisation in the following areas was important to us: Dealing with language development deficits (language work as a teaching principle), individual support and challenge, target-oriented use of digital media, increasing pupils' motivation, promoting their social competence, their ability to work in a team and empathy, their resilience, their self-efficacy, heart formation and mindfulness, Teaching the opportunities of diversity by increasing openness to new things, tolerance and the ability to compromise, preparing for globalisation/multilingualism/world-wide digitalisation by getting to know the European dimension of teaching and learning in order to expand our international communication and competence.
As I had already experienced in two Erasmus+ projects for school leaders how extremely enriching it is to look beyond one's own nose when one wants to further professionalise oneself or strike out in new directions, I was able to convince my colleagues to also want to make this experience in a project at colleague level. At the time of the application, we all agreed that we as teachers have the responsibility to develop ourselves further, to question old structures, to put the tried and tested to the test, to get to know new things and to try them out, because our pupils are also changing more and more, analogous to our society, becoming more and more heterogeneous, bringing different learning prerequisites, abilities and needs or (socio)cultural backgrounds with them to school. We felt challenged to face this global diversity, but at the same time to use the power it generates and decided to get support by participating in thematically diverse trainings, exchanging with people from educational institutions on a national/international level and by gaining insights into other school systems.