We wanted to find ourselves new pedagogical tools for our lessons and for the supporting of our students as homeroom teachers. We also wanted to update our knowledge and learn about the latest research on emotional intelligence and coaching skills and to learn how to be better at meeting with different kinds of learners and their families. The course that we participated in dealt with these questions and gave us new tools. As for developing our own competence in this field, the course provided with an opportunity to update our language skills when you had the opportunity to speak English the whole week with our foreign colleagues and the instuctor of the course and we made a lot of new contacts and friends, and we hope to be able to use these new contacts for the benefit of the whole school. As homeroom teachers our goal is to be able to guide and support our students and their families individually more and not only as subject teachers (as the case quite often in upper secondary schools is). We wanted to evoke discussion how to involve more active partaking when developing the student care and we also wanted to find new kinds of pedagogical methods on how to increase the motivation of students in different subjects.
We have paid attention to the deteriorating life management skills of the students, and consequently, students' motivation to study and work hard has decreased. The need for individual tutoring has increased and lately, more often we need to contact the students' guardians on various issues. This has been a clear change in the last few years compared to something like five years ago. Of course, Covid19 hastened this unfortunate development. We wanted to do something about this and chose this topic for our project to try to find new ways how to enhance our students' motivation and how to support them better. Also at our school this year we have chosen as our point of focus the wellbeing of students and teachers.