MET-VET’s key objectives focused on enhancing metacognitive skills and promoting environmental awareness within the VET sector. Specifically: - Facilitate Adoption of Environmental Metacognition Strategies: MET-VET aimed to integrate the strategies into 20 EU VET institutions, enabling learners to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning behaviours with a focus on sustainability. - Improve Metacognitive Abilities and Lifelong Learning Mindset: enhance environmental metacognitive abilities and foster positive mindset to lifelong learning among 300 VET learners. This involved developing deeper knowledge in planning, monitoring and reflectively evaluating performance, thus increasing self-efficacy. - Upskill VET Practitioners: upskill 60 VET practitioners by providing them with knowledge of environmental metacognitive theories. This enabled them to support and train learners in adopting these strategies, thus promoting self-directed and responsible learning. - Raise Profile of Environmental Metacognitive Skills: elevate importance of environmental metacognitive skills as core component of VET provision at both EU and national levels. By doing so, we aimed to align VET sector with broader EU environmental and sustainability targets.
We applied for the MET-VET project to address critical needs in the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector, particularly in response to the growing necessity for self-directed learning and environmental consciousness, mainly as a side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Recognising metacognitive awareness as a key skill required to undertake self-directed learning, we identified a significant need to enhance metacognitive awareness and abilities among VET learners and practitioners. In addition, global environmental challenges necessitate a shift towards sustainability across all sectors, including VET. The EU Strategy for Enhancing Green Skills and Competencies underscores the importance of integrating environmental education into the VET sector. Therefore, MET-VET aimed to merge metacognitive strategies with environmental awareness - termed environmental metacognition - to equip VET learners with the skills and mindset necessary for fostering sustainable practices through metacognitive skills. The MET-VET project specifically addressed the need for a reflective and forward-thinking green mindset among VET learners.