When we started the project, our main goal was to professionalize the team. We wanted teachers and therapists to get to know new activities and methodologies for children with a severe mental disability. Activities that we could use to stimulate the development of these children. We experience a gap in our training, and we want to enhance our competences, specifically for this target group. We also wanted everyone from the team to exchange experiences about the activities with the partners so they could learn from each other and expand their knowledge by sessions of intervision. Our third objective was to get to work with the new input seen at a visit. To implement the new activities in the home school, to get colleagues involved and motivated again. And last, as the coordinating country, we found it important to introduce new partners to the Erasmus programme and to experience this as an interesting exchange.
We are 4 special needs schools working with children with a severe mental disability. The project was started because we all had the same questions, the same intentions, we were all looking for new ways to help our children develop. Our target group is only a small group of students within the entire school population. Documentation, methodologies, ideas are rare, certainly, within our own country. In our training we learned to work inheritance-oriented, expecting a great deal of input from the children and with a big progress in development. With our students with a severe mental disability, we have to learn to slow down, to go slow, to give them time to process and to react. The children in our target group develop slow and they learn little by little, through a lot of repetition. In this we are searching. Because our target group develops in a different way, we have to adjust our “skills”. Therefor the project: “how to teach children with a severe mental disability” was started.