We wanted to facilitate a fruitful exchange of methods and experiences between teachers and disseminators working in or with special needs schools. There were 9 meetings total planned (objective 1). At first, the participants presented their good practices and contributed to building a method pool (objective 2), many of them relying on digital tools and broadening digital competencies (objective 3). After testing out the methods, sharing experiences and possible adjustments and documenting everything (objective 4), the most popular methods were written down with any important additional information for the creation of a brochure to be distributed to other teachers, disseminators and social workers as well (objective 5). We wanted to expand every participant's knowledge through sharing diverse experiences and be able to apply the best fitting methods in schools. We hope to gradually implement these practices to support students’ self-confidence long-term in everyday school life and give teachers a helping hand through our digitally accessible brochure. Henceforth, it becomes a priority to check in with the students and helps them to develop a healthy sense of self and ambitions for their future.
We applied for this project to build a method pool that would help students with special needs' self-confidence. Students with special needs are marginalized and oftentimes lack self-confidence, because society’s standards do not apply to them in some respects. In our experience, these students often do not anticipate ambitious goals for themselves, as they feel not qualified enough and do not always get the best support at home either. We wanted to counteract this by implementing small units in everyday school, which help the students to empower themselves. As every teacher’s and organization’s method pools are limited and differ from one another, we wanted to expand them. By connecting a small group of teachers and disseminators, we wanted to examine our methods in detail, put them into practice and adjust them if necessary. Above all we wanted to share our best practices with our project partners and learn from theirs in order to achieve progress inevitable for the establishment of a healthy and competitive environment for our students.