COoPING project tried to critically and innovatively compare different cooperative teaching methodologies adopted by partner organizations in a cross-cultural conceptual framework; therefore experimenting in combination with digital tools to support and enhance teachers and educators skills, working in particular with the 9-12 age group. The specific objective was to improve the quality of their work and, consequently, their pupils school experience, promoting their learning, well-being and inclusion.
The project found its motivation in the need of a community of teachers and educators, who work in different European schools, to explore different approaches to cooperative teaching in schools. They wanted to discuss together how these approaches are understood by the community itself and therefore how they are then translated into daily practices, in order to enhance positive change and didactic innovation primarily for participating organizations themselves. The project therefore aimed to validate all of those "cooperative" methodologies in the broadest sense, and measure their relative effectiveness in producing greater inclusion at school, also in combination with digital tools. In doing so, the partners explored new operational solutions to address the challenges of early school leaving, marginalization, or distance learning. Challenges particularly felt both by the Romanian partner, a school with an important national minority, i.e. the Roma; that from the Irish school, which has 20% of other nationalities among its pupils; and by the educators of the Pandora Cooperative, who work with multi-ethnic classes and in schools on the outskirts of large urban centres.