With our project we pursued two fundamental goals: exploring the surroundings of our institution as a place of learning, and developing our school into a multilingual place of learning. Through these changes, we wanted to improve our students' motivation, fun and of course, ultimately, academic achievement. Our everyday work had shown how important it is to complement traditional, cognition-based, teaching methods with innovative learning arrangements that appeal to diverse learning types. In everyday work, one hardly has the opportunity to compare the developments of the German school system with those of European partner countries. However, each country finds different ways of dealing with current trends such as digitalisation, individualisation and globalisation. By sending seven teachers to relevant training courses, these colleagues were supposed to gather knowledge and best practice tips and to network on a European level. Ultimately, our goal was and remains that the knowledge gained is applied in practice and passed on to all colleagues interested.
Building on our positive experiences during and after our Erasmus+ project 2016-2018, a highly motivated project group engaged in identifying new strategic aims for the further development of Carl-Benz-Schule (CBO). In this process, a development project with two major focal points emerged. On the one hand, colleagues wished for making greater use of our school's environment in the learning processes. As Carl-Benz-Schule is located directly at a forest, its location offers numerous opportunities to intensify learning outside the classrooms. We aimed at being trained in how outdoor learning can work in practice and, if possible, in several subjects. Our second focus aimed at further developing the school into a multilingual place of learning in order to sharpen our school profile and at the same time promote the integration of pupils from the "welcome classes". Our project group hoped to gain additional valuable insights and "best practice" tips about outdoor learning and bilingual teaching from discussions with course participants from numerous European countries,