Our school is a rather small unit which means that we do not really interact with other schools in our daily lives. We wanted our teachers to have a chance to maintain and develop their professional skills in teaching on a European level because we felt that one had to step away from the norms and the usual way of doing things to get a new perspective for things. We are a school in a remote area which means that, on the secondary school level, there is usually only one teacher teaching one subject. Thus, keeping up with the trends and updating knowledge requires a lot of effort from our teachers. Especially now that we are using the New National Curriculum in Finland, the need for discussion and co-operation between teachers and the need for new teaching methods and tools is even greater. Going outside Finland gives our teachers a chance to interact with teachers from other countries. We believe that talking to people who come from a different school system creates a fruitful atmosphere for new thoughts and ideas. Sending people abroad would not have been financially possible for our school without the help of Erasmus+. In addition, during the past eight years after many good and encouraging experiences in the first NordPlus and Erasmus+ -projects, we have actively tried to bring a European dimension to our everyday school life. This Erasmus+ - project was yet another step towards these goals. The objective of this specific Erasmus+ KA101 project was to be the kick-start for our goal in becoming a school that better considers the learner's own potential (learner-centred approach). The European training activities planned for this project were supposed to happen in summer 2020 which meant the knowledge acquired through these activities would have been available for use already at the beginning of school year 2020-2021 and, therefore, could benefit the whole project period and be a basis for the activities planned for the rest of the project period. Our plan was that this project would help in acquiring the needed knowledge and launching that knowledge into everyday use (improving staff competences, teaching and training content, new methods and tools, development of key competences and skills of staff and learners). We strongly believed that giving our teachers a chance to maintain and improve their teaching skills will motivate them, gives them a sense of competence, and allows and encourages them to try out new ideas, materials, and methods. A motivated teacher will result in motivating teaching and will benefit the pupils in that way. For our teachers, us being a small school, these European in-service training courses were a great way to meet colleagues from all over Europe and to build contacts and networks for possible future projects (European dimension).
Varpaisjärvi School (Varpaisjärven koulu) is a comprehensive school in the rural village of Varpaisjärvi in Eastern Finland. Varpaisjärvi (about 2000 inhabitants) is a part of a bigger municipality Lapinlahti. We have a combined primary and secondary school which means that we teach grades 1-9 according to the Finnish school system and the Finnish National Curriculum for Education. We teach all the children in the village from very varied socio-economical backgrounds and with very varied academic skills and special needs. These factors bring quite a lot of challenge for teaching. Many of our teachers also teach both at the primary and secondary level which requires a lot of knowledge and experience. In September 2019 we had meetings for teachers about Erasmus+ in our school. In these meetings we talked about how we wanted to develop the school in the near future and how Erasmus+ would fit into these plans. We chose learner/student-centred approach as our school’s main theme for the upcoming two years. And, thus, we also named this project with the title: ‘Refocusing teaching: from teacher-centred approach towards learner-centred approach’. The need for this theme came from our teachers’ desire to better meet the requirements of the new Finnish National Curriculum for teaching. We felt that the goals the Curriculum sets for highlighting the role of the learner were not properly met in Finnish schools and we thought that especially our school (at the moment) lacked the needed knowledge and skills for helping the students to become the agitators of their own learning. In many ways, our teaching was still teacher centred. But, at the same time, we wanted to put our students in the spotlight and make them take responsibility of their own learning, be motivated, and do their best. The classes we teach are very heterogenic and it requires a lot of planning and imagination to be able to help and support each individual student. We felt that the learner-centred approach could help us in doing this. The main goal of our school was, and still is, to, slowly but determinedly, try to refocus our teaching by moving away from the teacher-centred approach towards a more learner-centred approach. We realized that to do this, our staff needed a clear plan and training. And this was where the European Development Plan and Erasmus+ had an important role to play. Our school did not have a lot of expertise in learner-centred approach, and this is why we chose this theme for our European Development Plan. We had, however, some experience of Erasmus+ projects. In 2019 we finished our two-year Erasmus+ KA229 project with four partner schools with high honours (our final report for the Czech national office was awarded 93/100 points). In addition, our school had received a few Comenius/Erasmus grants for staff mobility. In October 2019 one of our teachers attended an Erasmus+ contact seminar in Slovakia and because of that, we also applied and were granted for an Erasmus+ KA229 project for years 2020-2022 as coordinators. This Erasmus+ KA229 project is titled 'Recentering Learning- Four A’s of the Modern Life: Art, athletics, academics, and autonomy’. Both Erasmus+ projects have the same main theme: we want to develop our teaching and learning culture from a teacher-centered one to a more learner-centered one. The view on the theme is just different, but the projects strongly support each other and thus offer opportunities for more comprehensive conclusions.