We wanted to further develop our teaching team, which has been engaged in a process of educational innovation since 2018, in their thinking about education and to give them tools and inspiration to contribute to that new educational concept, the goals of which were: - Students are given more autonomy over their learning process. - Students are personally coached in their learning process. - There is a good mix between independent work, group/collaboration, instruction, theory and practice. - We work on clear goals, which each student can achieve through his own way, at his pace and at his level. - Work will not be done in homogeneous but heterogeneous groups of students. - Coaching and learning goal-oriented teachers to guide their students in their individual educational path. - There is sufficient structure in all choices and paths to continue to pay attention to both the group feeling and the need for clarity for many of our students. By taking a look in Sweden and doing job shadowing with colleagues who have been teaching in this way and with those goals for years, we wanted to achieve a supported concept in the team about the structure of our education and extra quality and knowledge in the classroom of the students.
Initially, we signed up to gain inspiration for our school, which was in the process of working according to the principles of Kunskapsskolan education. We wanted to visit Swedish Kunskapsskolan schools to integrate the knowledge we acquired there into the development of our concept. However, this was not possible due to COVID and we have already started personalized learning (GPL) inspired by the principles of Kunskapsskolan in the 2021-2022 school year. Only when traveling to Swedish schools was possible again did we start making the trips and so the goal has become more to test our practice at that time against what we saw in Sweden and to get ideas from that to improve our own concept. We originally wanted to go to Sweden with different groups, each with different goals: the design group, the teachers who would teach the concept, the Waldorf teachers, the support staff and the school management. The design group would go first, because they would adjust their designed concept based on the visit. In the end, we always went with groups that came from each original group. So teachers, support staff and school management.