Crescer VIA Europa
Start date: Jun 1, 2014,
End date: May 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
The European Development Plan of our organization has as its main goal to widen and consolidate the school’s internationalisation plan, bearing in mind the development of innovative practices,the school’s modernisation as well as foster educational quality not only for students but also for the whole school community.
Based on the staff mobility learning possibilities established by the new Erasmus + Progamme– KA1-Saff Mobility- and considering our instituion’s needs, we have organized a mobility and professional development plan for teachers and the whole staff–to be developed in the 2014-2016, taking a longer-term view within the framework of the Eu 2020 Strategy.
As a TEIP Grouping of schools which aims to meet the needs of a multicultural community, with students from kindergarten to upper secondary level (3-18 year-olds).Our priority is the development of different level of responses offered to our pupils (regular education, music artistic education, alternative curriculum courses, professional courses, early intervention (with 0-6 year-old children), a support unit from primary to lower secondary level students with severe disabilites, we have established some priority training areas focusing on using ICT based methodologies in the classroom.Besides we our intervention is in special multicultural contexts giving special enphasis on fighting early school leaving, pre-school education and promoting practices with special needs students, STEM, environmental education and sustainability. We consider that job shadowing or an intensive 5 day training course are the ones which better match our needs once they allow our staff to observe and reflect on other professionals practices, in different contexts, adopting new ideas, envisaging both other solutions and innovative educational methodologies.
In the latest years, our Agrupamento de Escolas de Vialonga has actively been involved in Lifelong Learning Programmes, mainly Comenius, but also Leonardo da Vinci, Grundtvig, Comenius Assistants as well as In Service Teacher Training Courses.In these projects our teachers from different levels of education and lower secondary level students have been involved. These projects strongly contributed to their personal and professional development as well as the introduction and development of european dimension in education.Bearing in mind the results achieved in previous european projects, we intend to keep developing the european experience and so we wish to have more professionals participating in the mobilities.Besides we will disseminate the mobilities throughout the staff of the different departments in our institution in order to enable real changes in the practices and to meet the permanent challenges our set of schools face.
The established training programme for the next two years has been designed not only after the analysis of the potential and identified needs on the Agrupamento’s Educational Project (AEP) but also considering its training needs assessment for staff in order to really meet the objectives defined in the AEP.
A coordinating team was formed and it will be responsible for the monitoring of the whole process from preparation of the participants, logistic support during mobilities to the evaluation and dissemination stages.We have planned KA1 mobilites for 50 professionals (about 15% of the staff) and they will develop learning actions in job shadowing or intensive courses, 5 days maximum (10 days for foreign language teachers), in groups (range of 3 to 6 teachers),in the following european countries: France, Czech Republic, Germany, United Kingdom, Malta, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. We have already established contacts with different training institutions in these countries, although the contracts will only be signed after this KA1 project approval.With this training programme,our first goall is to provide the involved professionals with the possibility of developing a number of skills and knowledge acquisition through direct contact with reality and with the good practices developed in other European countries.Besides we aim the improvement of both linguistic and ICT based skills as well as the possibility to develop new pedagogical approaches and methodologies. We also want to provide our staff with the possibility to acquire more collaborative and cooperative project skills through job shadowing along with other European partners.As a practical result of our staff participation in this KA1 mobilities training courses, they will disseminate and implement what they have learnt in our Agrupamento schools context, ensuring more sustainability and fostering educational impact on their peers, students and the school community as a whole. To sum up, it is our objective to contribute to develop more innovative educational approaches with increasingly effective practices in fighting early school leaving and enhancing each student’s educational success.