To enrich the teacher's skillset with new methods and tools: working with immigrants, students with special needs, students with extraordinary achievements. To be open to new educational challenges. To integrate immigrants into our community, help them to become more involved in our community and create more equal opportunities. To increase the diversity awareness among the students and faculty, increasing acceptance towards immigrants. To grain necessary skills to work with students with extraordinary achievements and in the multicultural, multiethnic group. To awaken students' creativity. To broaden the knowledge about the importance of technology and multimedia in teaching, to learn new methods and ways of teaching language. To uncover new methodological solutions and practical skills while working with students with disabilities. To improve foreign language skills, one level up. To get familiar with CLIL and to learn about how to use it. To learn about new technologies, using TIK and to learn how to use this knowledge while working in a classroom setting: creating new teaching materials, lesson ideas, tests and quizzes for students.
We applied for the project because there was an enormous need to discover new methods of teaching in a multicultural and diverse environment. When we started writing our project, we had 27 students from Ukraine (currently 147). We are a school with one of the largest number of immigrant and refugee students in our area). Immigrant kids would often report feeling uneasy in the new community, they were alienated and they didn't actively participate in the school activities, they couldn't use their full potential. Sometimes they would also encounter intolerance from their peers. Aside from that we also had a vast group of students who had learning difficulties: 20 students requiring special education, 19 with a diagnosis from a professional. We had 13 teachers organizing special education (autism, Aspergers, physical disabilities and mental disabilities), however they needed more specialized knowledge and resources to keep up with an increasing demand for such help. In our school the faculty consists of mostly teachers over 45 years of age (85% of all teachers) and we wanted to keep up with the ever changing technology, refresh our memory and skills, as well as learn new methods and tools that we can use during classes.