21st century soft skills for teachers in VET is an innovative project aiming to equip teachers involved in VET schools with knowledge and ability to apply most essential 21st century skills. Nowadays European economies are driven by globalization, development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the diversity of values in society. Future is becoming more and more unpredictable in a wide variety of areas. Students, who are at schools now, should learn to live in a world that is constantly changing and in the future be prepared unprecedented economic, political, social and cultural environment. No doubt, arrange of 21st century skills is needed to be developed in the students, to address the ever-changing future for their well-being. There are guidelines, curricula and methodologies introducing the training of soft skills in vocational education. For majority of teachers, this kind of approach is new. Neither they acquire such skills themselves, not they have methodology how to include the skills in their educational activities and train the students. Moreover, project partners – schools, have experienced that new approaches, training the skills are lot easier accepted and developed for students rather than teachers in the framework of “Future of Education and Skills 2030” gained by OECD and used by each partner country and educational institutions as education guidelines for new educational approaches. Therefore we decide to focus on teachers in this project. The objective of this project is VET teachers who are able to work with core set of skills - skills that they master themselves and are capable to assist in development of the skills with their students. Teachers who want lifelong learning and can inspire students to that; teachers who can master ICT tools not staying behind their students, teachers who can address challenges and be a role model in the eyes of the students. We aim to achieve above described targets with several steps: - involve partner schools’ teachers, students and key employers in research to narrow down OECD’s list of 21st century on most essential skills - develop practical guidelines and set of training material, including digital, interactive materials and education videos and training program for teacher training - design a training course - train the trainers approach - involve focus group of teachers in training activity within the project - involve teachers in multiplier events where teachers who already trained will train others - all teachers (within consortium and outside) to have access to research results and training materials - key persons involved in project learning teaching training activities will be doing training events after project Target group of the project are VET teachers within participating organizations; their needs are confidence in a work with students to prepare them for the unknown future. What are the needs of the teachers - real training of the skills for themselves through learn how to teach method to learn how it can be done with students during their theoretical and practical VET training. The project will be implemented by three partners - FU Academy in Tenerife, Spain, ROC van Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Riga Technical School of Tourism and Creative Industry, Latvia (project coordinator). All involved partners are working internationally and have been partners in Erasmus+ KA1 mobilities and Erasmus+ PRO mobilities and staff exchanges for a long time. Many of challenges concerning the lack of skills are revealed in international work – activities that require teachers to step out of the comfort zone and think outside the box. This is where we believe those challenges can be overcome.
Project aim is to train and educate teachers of vocational education and training institutions, prepare them so that they are ready for working with most essential 21st century soft skills during their classes with their students. In order to do that, project developers set a target to determine which soft skills are most needed in the VET, what training approaches do teachers value, to develop self-guided, easy to use training materials and a training course for the teachers in VET.
Nowadays European economies are driven by globalization, development of ICT and the diversity of values in society. 21st century soft skills that had been marked up by OECD in the “Directorate for education and skills”. It is prioritized to support educators by improving their soft skills and to support them in acquiring and developing these skills on the basis of vocational education and training. Teachers are working in a fast changing environment, that most precisely can be described by a quote that has been widely shared on social media: “are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist, in order to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet”. To face the unknown, it’s identified that certain soft skills are needed to be developed through the education process. A lot is expected from the teachers and few support is provided to train the teachers’ soft skills. This project is developed to address the needs of teachers in VET, the needs for apropriate and easy to follow learning materials on soft skills.