The European Council of October 2017 called for education and training systems to be ‘fit for the digital age’. However, according to the Digital Education Action Plan (COM 2018 12 final) “progress on integrating technology in education remains limited”. The recent “European Skills Agenda for sustainable competitiveness, social fairness and resilience” (COM 2020 274 final) stated that the Covid19 emergency revealed “the limitations of our current digital preparedness”, and especially in the education system. Our project is designed to target one of the most pressing issues in the educational landscape across Europe: how to make the transition of teaching and learning from the traditional face-to-face setting into the modern digital realm. This enormous task is further aggravated through the extraordinary conditions the Covid-19 pandemic has put upon schools and societies. Now there is the need to accomplish this transition in a very short time period. While there are a lot of objective obstacles to be overcome like the lack of hardware (especially with students from low-income-families), missing software or non-existing broadband internet access, the most profound hurdle is the mindset of teachers, students and parents. Digital education is broadly viewed as inferior and only acceptable as a substitute in times of an emergency. While the economy is making big steps toward a digital era (work 4.0), the educational system is persevering in a century-old setting. Our project aims to make a difference in the underlying triangle of teachers, students and parents and develop a growth mindset in all three points of this specific triangle. A growth mindset, according to Carol Dweck, enables individuals to overcome failures and open them for new experiences and skills. It gives us a fundamentally different view of our abilities and changes our perception of changes and challenges. This growth mindset is not only a suitable metaphor for the modern attitude within the current generation of students but rather the pivotal requirement for the successful transition of education into the digital realm. Only with a growth mindset, the educational triangle can support young people to acquire the skills needed for the labour market of the near future. This project has five objectives that we together aim to achieve: 1. better teachers self-efficacy in regard to their digital skillset 2. better usage of digital tools by students through growth mindset methods 3. better the acceptance of digital tools within parents 4. broaden the support for a growth mindset at schools 5. practical growth mindset model for digital teaching We will engage members of all three points of the educational triangle as our target groups: - teachers - students - parents Digital education inherently needs a growth mindset, because it is based on a fundamentally different kind of engagement of the students. While students might - through their age and their natural habit to be curious - be better equipped to develop this kind of mindset, teachers and parents have a much harder way to go. Thus, we will apply our experiences from different previous projects to helping the whole educational triangle to develop the necessary growth mindset. We will develop innovative practices that are based on the individual as well as the collective needs of teachers, students and parents. Digital education will be a key part of the European educational landscape even after the current Covid-19-pandemic is over. With a growth mindset, the necessary transition into the digital world will be much easier for everyone. Our activities: - four intellectual outputs (IO) with a focus on the support of growth mindset within the whole educational triangle, including a growth mindset model for digital teaching - two short-term joint staff training events for the project partners (Train - the - trainer event for growth mindset, Interactive workshop for design of growth mindset model) - one central multiplier event titled “Promoting growth mindset in the educational triangle” in Germany - five multiplier events titled “Best practices: growth mindset in digital education” (one in each country) - Pan European conference on the growth mindset activities in digital education. - four transnational project meetings, one of them as a virtual meeting Long term benefits and sustainability: the developed IO and the content will be made available online for the public in five languages. We will ensure that this website will remain online after the finalization of the project for five years. The teachers that were trained in the training activities will coach colleagues and disseminate the principles of growth mindset further. Our growth mindset model for digital teaching with its compendium of best practices can be used throughout the school landscape in the EU.
We have set five specific goals for our project: 1. improving teachers' self-efficacy in relation to their digital skills 2. Improve students' use of digital tools. 3. increase parents' acceptance of digital tools 4. increase support for growth mindset in schools 5. a reusable practical model for growth mindset in digital education. With these concrete goals, we focused on all stakeholders in the learning process and included their specific roles, but also their specific interests and conditions. We were and are convinced that only with this holistic approach a real improvement in the use of digital teaching tools can be achieved. The consistent inclusion of the growth mindset principles also leads to an improvement in analogue teaching.
The forced shift to digital teaching and learning during the Corona pandemic has challenged teachers, students and parents alike. Almost everyone was overwhelmed by the speed and scope of the changes and hardly anyone was adequately prepared. Digital education has been given a relatively bad image as a result. The inherent advantages and possibilities of this form of teaching faded into the background. With our project, we wanted to give all those involved in the educational process - teachers, students and parents - concrete support in using the modern forms and means of teaching, which will be even more important in the future, in a beneficial way. We are convinced that digital learning methods were not just a stopgap during the pandemic, but will have a firm and important place in the education system of the future. The theory of growth mindset according to C. Dweck can help as an overarching basis to overcome resistance in the target groups towards digital teaching.