It is common practice for teachers to work alone with their students, without engaging in many collaborative practices with their colleagues. While the necessity to prepare young people for full participation in a rapidly changing society has been noted by educational policy makers at an international level, leading to increased emphasis on the development of students’ key skills and competences, this is not often reflected in teacher professional development and the corresponding development of their own key skills. There is a significant body of research that points to the need for methods of teaching and learning that are innovative, competence-based and student-centred, but despite moves to change the curricular focus, a traditional model of schooling is still prevalent. Teachers are the agents of change in the reform process but can also be inflexible and can resist change unless they understand and agree with the reasoning behind a reform, its implications for their classroom practice, and consequences for their students. An objective of this project is to support and enhance the development of collaborative and reflective environments (CaRE) in schools. We will mirror the development of key skills and competences that are generally advocated for students, within the whole-school environment by encouraging teachers to work increasingly collaboratively, and by providing structures in which sharing, communicating and critically reflecting on practice become the norm. Through collaboration with our partners across Europe, we aim to establish a set of guidelines to support teachers to come together to communicate and share good practice and creative approaches, and to critically evaluate and reflect. In order to facilitate this, one of the project objectives is to develop resources for reflection at whole-school level. Our aim is to develop tools and procedures that assist in the identification of common goals as well as resources for planning and assessing progress towards them. A related objective is to develop a commonly agreed upon set of descriptions of the key skills (Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity and Self-Direction) and of activities or actions that may be indicative of their development. This should support teachers’ capacity to integrate the development of key skills into their classrooms, and to effectively monitor and assess their students in this regard. A total of 42 participants will take part in this project, made up of 6 teachers from each of the 7 partner schools. Thanks to the transnational nature of the project, and the choice of partners within geographic clusters as well as individual schools, we have been able to establish a project structure that reflects three levels of CaRE: within schools, between schools, and online. The project involves 6 LTTs; 2 in Ireland and 1 in each of the other partner countries. Throughout the project, the partners will develop processes and resources to support CaREs in their school, within their cluster, and at project level. The theory that will be used to underpin the activities is drawn from research into Communities of Practice, with particular emphasis on the “TeachMeet” approach. An overarching Theory of Change (ToC) methodology will be employed. This is an innovative and holistic method that can be used to assess the progress of the project in terms of meeting its overarching goals, individual activity aims, and to guide the project participants in evaluating their own progress. Within the ToC framework, qualitative and quantitative indicators will be employed to monitor the progress, quality and achievements of the project and its activities. By working with schools in a variety of countries and contexts, we hope to develop a robust but flexible set of guidelines and resources. It is expected that this project will have a positive impact at local, regional, national, European and potentially international levels. In fact, the structure of the project will support such impact at each of these levels through the development of CaRE in Schools, CaRE Clusters and CaRE online, with each level growing from and building on the previous. Through the LTTs and development of outputs, our intention is to abstract the fundamental structures and supports required in order to successfully develop CaREs at each of these levels, in order to create resources that can be used to inform other institutions’ development in this way. In addition, the modules and resources developed through the project will support these burgeoning CaRE communities at European/international levels. Longer-term, we also see potential for the project to have an impact at national levels on teacher initial education and professional development programmes. Our hope is to demonstrate, through rigorous research, the benefit of developing and supporting CaREs in schools, promoting communities of practice and developing critical and reflective practitioners.
By implementing this project, the aim was to support teachers’ understanding of the importance of their own collaborative and reflective practices, such that they would be better placed to do likewise for their own students. Our intention was not only to support this development withing the participating teachers, but also to identify strategies and develop the tools and resources that could help a wider, transnational audience to engage with these processes. In order to support this goal, our aim was to develop a suite of resources and handbooks to be used by educators, including five handbooks to support CaRE practices in various contexts; tools to support reflection and change; tools to support understanding and assessment of key skills; two professional development modules (Teacher as Researcher and Teacher as CaRE Coach); and three research documents including a CaRE Charter, baseline analysis and impact report. Our goal was to house these resources on a public website, supported by instructional multimedia components.
There is a significant body of research that points to the need for methods of teaching and learning that are innovative, competence-based and student-centred, but despite moves to change the curricular focus, a traditional model of schooling is still prevalent. Teachers are the agents of change in the reform process but can also be inflexible and can resist change unless they understand and agree with the reasoning behind a reform, its implications for their classroom practice, and consequences for their students. The primary aim of this project was to support and enhance the development of collaborative and reflective environments (CaRE) in schools. It focused on developing strategies and systems to support the development of communities of practice within and between institutions to develop teachers’ own competence in and understanding of key, 21st Century Skills. To support engagement in this change process, this project used an iterative and experiential approach to the creation of communities, as well as related resources that can be used to support similar experiences in wide ranging institutions and contexts