“We are committed to help every learner develop as a whole person, fulfill his or her potential and help shape a shared future”. Totally agreeing with this goal defined by OEDC and in order to make it happened in our schools to fulfill those goals of OEDC to the future of education we created this project, based in cooperation at European level. I - We believe that developing student's soft skills and emotional intelligence will empower them to face the future challenges, as the current situation of the world pandemic is an example. As this is still a recent subject in European school’s curricula we decided to create this project and start a cooperation between five European schools which share the will and motivation to implement specific strategies and methods to develop emotional intelligence and soft skills at school context, on a consistent basis, in order to contribute to pupils' personal development and success. II - We try a different solution to an old problem: Often school failure is not related to learning difficulties, but it lies in deeper and more comprehensive causes of deficits in the soft skills, related to each pupil’s context as an individual and as a human and social being. In order to help those students, we need to empower them with the right skills, namely soft skills (self-esteem, autonomy, self-control resilience…) and emotional intelligence which will lead to the achievement of one or two of the main objectives. III – We want to give importance to motivation. In the era of digital transformation, it is even more difficult to motivate students for traditional school tasks, so teachers need to be empowered with new educational strategies and resources to increase pupils’ motivation and efficacy. We will use multimedia to motivate and engage students in school projects and to promote communication at and from school to the world. With this project we want to reach these main objectives: Increase motivation at school, for learners and teachers; Reinforce students’ engagement in school projects; Enhance social skills through team work and several common activities among partners; Improve social and interpersonal relationship between students; Develop emotional intelligence in learners and staff; Develop soft skills for learners and staff; Use multimedia (video) to increase communication at school and between schools; Develop specific skills on audiovisual and multimedia (to create short movies and video contents); Reinforce awareness of European cultural diversity; Increase the use of ICT in all phases of the project; Increase digital literacy using multiple digital resources to search and share knowledge about emotional intelligence and different topics; Use foreign languages to communicate and present specific contents ; Increase foreign languages skills for students and teachers; Methodology: Phase I - Each partner school will focused on a specific method and activity and will implement it in its school. Phase II - They share the method / strategy and results with partners through eTwinning. Phase III - Each school experiments other's strategies/methods with their own classes and share comments, results and assessment reports with partners through eTwinning. Phase IV- Each school will experiment their most efficient strategies/methods in site, with partners, during transnational pupils' exchanges, involving students from all partnering schools. All coordinators analyse the strategy/method and do the assessment report, to decide if and how these methods will be part of the e-guide. We'll use a big variety of methods: Team work; active learning; gaming; debate; drama... Tangible Results: e-guide (on students’ soft skills enchanement); Presentations (Prezi, PowerPoint, PowToon or similar);Theater play;Video documentary;Video Festival; Project Website;YouTube channel;Web page; eTwinning TwinSpace; Photo album (digital);Photo exhibition; Art exhibition; Project song; We will monitor and assess each activity during and at the end to measure in what extend it has contributed to the project goals, using questionnaires to all participants and observers (students and teachers, parents and other member of local community eventually involved). We will also do the assessment of each pupils' exchange as a whole activity in order to evaluate if and in what extend we achieved that meeting predefined goals. The assessment methodology will include questionnaires (Google forms) for all participants, teachers, parents but also interviews to guests and reports for teachers from the host school to report their students "behavior" comparing everyday with that Erasmus week and finally the very important teachers' and students' grids we will fill in to check the efficacy of each activity in developing motivation, soft skills and emotional intelligence. To spread and dissemination we'll have events in all schools, a flash drive with the e-guide; websites; YouTube channel;on-line TV.
“We are committed to help every learner develop as a whole person, fulfill his or her potential and help shape a shared future”.Totally agreeing with this goal defined by OEDC and in order to make it happened in our schools to fulfill those goals of OEDC to the future of education we created this project, based in schools' cooperation at European level. We started by learning more about the main topics "soft skills and emotional intelligence" by promoting workshops and conferences leaded by external experts and addressed to teachers in our schools. Then coordinator school started to implement and share with partners several activities with students, in order to reinforce their soft skills, such as: . Soft Skills Promotion Sessions – clarification and practical sessions about soft Skills – were held in the project team and during the project meetings with partners; • Attentive to Myself Moment – moment of conscious breathing and relaxation – in class sessions and in meetings with Erasmus partners; • Mindfulness sessions – promotion of this practice and implementation of activities in the classroom context; • Mediation Office – Mediate with Emotional Intelligence – promotion of soft skills and how they are fundamental to transform conflicts into challenges. This Mediation office was oranized in articulation with the Student and Family Support Office of the coordinator school. Philosophy for Children – primary school project that promotes constructive and positive thinking. - Using the Class assembly - a week session organized with the class teacher to put in practice a methodology where students are heard about any subject and all have the right and the oportunity to speak and give their contribution to the collective decisions. All partners tried some of those ativities and during the project meetings and pupils' exchanges all participants had the opportunity to experiment different methods and practices to develop soft skills and emotional intelligence. At the end all coordinators gather and decided which of those activities should be part of the final project eBook, a guide to promote soft skills and emotional intelligence at school. At the final meeting, in Portugal, coordinator school presented the final eBook This handbook to reinforce soft skills at school was made in two versions: English and Portuguese and was shared with teachers from other schools, who were at the presentation event. This eBook is the main project product because summarize the best methods and activities we experimented to deveop soft skills at the school community, including students, parents, teachers and staff. To make this project sustainable, we'll keep the main iniciatives at school for the future, as: - Keep implementing specific methods and ativities to reinforce soft skills and emotional intelligence in class, using the handbook we created during the project and sharing it with all teachers of our schools. This topic will be mandatory for Citizenship teachers and will be suggested as optional for the crosscurriculum class project. - the Mediation Office, which will continue open for next years, where students can come anytime they have any issue or conflict situation to solve. - Coordinator school also decided and suggested to other partners to organize a Soft Skills event every year, where we'll invite some experts, recognized at national level, to lead some conferences to which we'll invite all schools of the region. We truly believe that the seed we sowed in 2020 has already begun to blossom and will soon bear fruit, giving rise to a set of positive practices at school, which is becoming a happy school for everyone.