Our goals in this project were: 1) To raise general awareness among the teaching staff of the school’s EU activities and programmes for both professional and individual development and growth. 2) To improve and extend the participants‘ language skills in order to enable them to execute special job tasks or to take part in, or initiate, further international projects and cooperations. 3) To allow the participants to acquire new, or to extend their existing, subject-specific and instructional know-how, expertise and skills in order to increase the quality of education and teaching. 4) To enable the participants to get to know European VET institutions and to witness how teaching and vocational training is done in other European countries so that they would be able to prepare German students well for both student mobilities and the requirements of an international labour market. 5) To establish new international contacts which may become partners in future EU activities and projects.
The central idea behind offering staff mobilities was the intention to strengthen the school’s European Dimension. Being part of the school’s European Development Plan (which was included in the application as an attachment), teachers’ mobilities aim at supporting the realization of the development goals outlined therein. Another basic assumption was that participants would be strongly inclined to share their abroad experiences and promote EU mobilities in classes convincingly because they could do so first-hand. In this way we were hoping that the experiences the teachers made would help to promote the school's EU activities as well as the European Idea itself, and lead to an increased interest in student mobilities and to more students seizing this opportunity. In addition, the mobilities were meant to enhance the participants' vocational motivation, satisfaction, and commitment, to strengthen their identification with the school and its EU development goals, and to encourage them to take part actively in further EU-activities, helping to accomplish our objectives.