iEmpower In this project our priority is to provide skills and competences that are essential for students to become and develop themselves as lifelong learners and to foster their employability, socio-educational and personal development, as well as participation in civic and social life. Our main goal is to increase students’ well-being by providing them with means and skillsets to better understand and control themselves together with the processes that determine their self-image and the emotional responses that are triggered by different events and conditions at schools. The focus of our project is to increase students’ well-being. We have decided to narrow down the research work on two key areas: assessment practice and copying skills; and building endurance and resilience through different motivational theories. The OECD have pointed out that students need to master certain skills that will help them cope with challenges they will be facing during the 21st Century. This will affect teachers’ practices and we need to develop methods how we provide skills for lifelong learning. Carol Dweck is one of the researchers whose research we’ll focus on, especially her studies on how to learn and which factors influence endurance and resilience. We will also look at motivation theories within the “Fixed or Growth mindset”. The research method for the project is action research. This means that the project is based on a bottom-up strategy, where the goals for each testing period are tentative and overall. We believe that the correct methodology for sharing “best practice” is workshops where the participants themselves, using theory and results from surveys and interviews, tip the target questions when they meet, so that the methods they will try out is both practical and possible. It is the participants who know the field best. Therefore, we have included both teachers, treiners and our students in the project as participating co-researchers. This ensures ownership and co-determination in the project. Action research is changing practice, developing understanding of practice and changing the context. We believe that by establishing a “learning network” and arranging workshops, we will create space for building understanding, knowledge, relationships and collaboration between all the parties involved. We find that the students as groups on the Football programs at two of the participarting schools show more endurance and resilience than other groups in the schools. This is evident through good school results and little drop out. In addition to the regular transnational workshops where teachers and studenst from various programmes participate, we therefore want to conduct two workshops with participants from the football programs, where students and coaches explore the mechanisms that take place during the football activities and whether these have transfer value into other teaching situations. To track improvements through testing new practices, we will use various methods to collect data throughout the project; surveys and interviews. To help us with the operationalization of good research questions and to validate the research, we have engaged the researchers Sjur Langeland and Anders Ruud Fosnæs. They are both qualified school development researchers, Fosnæs in particular with his experience with quantitative school research at his workplace Conexus Although we have chosen this to be a “sharing best practice”project, more than an innovative one, we still want to be left with documentation of lasting value and a possibility for wider sharing and dissemination. After the projects have been evaluated by participants and researchers, we intend to present the result in an Intellectual Output, reports and a tool kit to be used by anyone. The output will be presented on a website produced and maintained by students at West London College and as a simple booklet. As part of dissemination we will arrange a Presentation event in spring 2023. The project is run by four schools; West London college, England, Seinäjoen lukio, Finland, St. hallvard Upper secondary Scool and Lier Upper secondary school, both Norwegian. Together the four schools represent a diversity of population and organisations making the project core sufficiently transnational and represent well different organisational structures and regions in Europe. The project’s most relevant priority is supporting opportunities for all in acquiring and developing key competences. In addition it emphasizes engaging, connecting and empowering young people. iEmpower!
Our main objective has been increasing students’ well-being by providing them with tools to reflect on their learning and understanding as well as accepting themselves better. Each participant tailor-made the programme to suit their educational practices and contexts. The project has been a journey of developing schools that are more capable of understanding how to improve students’well-being and providing them with skills that make them more resilient. By meeting each other regularly we have been able to reflect on the processes, provide feedback and hone the programme that has been developed in each school. The objectives of the programme have been: Intangible objectives - Increased sense of well-being - Stronger sense of self-reliance - More motivated students and staff - Improved endurance and resilience - Better sense of European educational practices and cultural heritage Tangible objectives - More versatile assessment practice with focus on formative assessment - Systemic practices of increasing the well-being of students - Systemic practices of building students’ coping skills - Systemic practices of building students’ resilience -Guideline for homeroom teacher's duties, including teacher's schedule for the academic year
All the partners shared their interest in improving students’ well-being. By finding appropriate tools we would be able to enhance students’ growth into more independent and engaged members of society. We wanted to explore and research if by changing some of the practices at school, we could increase students’ motivation and well-being, provide them with key competences to make them capable of taking the ownership of their learning and development. There was a consensus that the key to increase well-being is making students more aware of themselves and helping them to reflect more deeply on their learning, ways of thinking and goals, and employing those tools they will be empowered to take the ownership of their learning and lives. The partners all have very different settings, contexts and educational goals as well as practices that determine the learning environments but each school recognizes that student well-being has become a challenge over the past few years. There is a strong belief that we can learn from each other in the process and even though the tools to reach the objectives might be different due to the different educational systems as well as the challenges of the students, the means are the same. The wealth of different schools and versatile core of students from different parts of Europe will provide a good starting point to get meaningful results and gain insight into various ways of understanding how the topic of well-being might be understood and enhanced in different cultural settings.