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Developing Further Competences and Employability
Developing Further Competences and Employability
Start date: Jun 1, 2015,
End date: May 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
This project aims to provide teachers, of programme specific subjects as well as core subjects, opportunities to specific competence development that cannot be given in Sweden. The project involves work shadowing, study visits and language studies. Teachers will receive increased competence and knowledge and this will strengthen them in their professional role to help students reach the objectives of curricula and syllabi. Since the programme specific subjects should be the core of teaching in all subjects it´s important that all teachers are involved, no matter what subject they teach.
For our students the aim is to give them the opportunities to do their workplace-based learning abroad which will increase their employability and develop their further competencies.
An outcome will be increased quality of our education/teaching which is an essential part of our effort to keep our programmes up-to-date. We want to continue the positive trend of increasing number of applicants, a direct effect of emphasizing on internationalisation. We have an internationalisation plan for our vocational programs that outline our international work and it is closely linked to the national curriculum.
In recent years we have seen a tendency that internationalisation leads to fewer dropouts and more students than before pass their diploma goals. This is another strong reason for focusing more on it..
The purpose of working actively with internationalisation is to help students reach the objectives of curricula and syllabi and increase their chances for an attractive job after graduation. But also give the opportunity to develop the eight key competences that EU believes all citizens need. Our vocational programs have in accordance to this agreed on future competencies that all subjects should work towards, these are: communicative and social skills, ability to independence, interpersonal skills, digital skills, service skills, problem solving skills, craftsmanship, responsibility and initiative. Our students will get opportunities to develop these competencies during their workplace-based learning. Through internationalisation, students will become aware of their own learning, as they are active throughout the process. Students will be challenged both in the classroom and at their workplace-based learning places.
Activities: To achieve increased goal attainment and employability, students in grades 2 and 3 are given the opportunity to workplace-based learning in Mallorca, Belgium, Malta, Norway, Poland and Italy during 2-16 weeks. Each partner that we work with has a contract with us. This contains what parts of the courses the workplace-based learning should contain, how the assessment should be done and what the assessment criteria are. Throughout the learning period there will be a continuous contact with the mentor and student. Through this we ensure the student's development to meet the criteria and there is a progression throughout these coming years.
Each teacher has a competence plan, which has been agreed on in joint consultation with the principal and the team leader, and which meets the needs of our programmes’ development. This could be work shadowing to get better insight in and learn from other cultures’ working methods in cooking, marketing of their business, different tourism and hotel activities. This new knowledge will be shared and directly transferred to develop students. And will help to increase goal attainment for students.
Since our students come from many different cultures and socio-economic condition it is of great importance from a society perspective that everyone is given equal opportunity to participate in international projects, at least once during their education.
We have developed criteria and an application process to use for all exchanges. Fundamental to all participants is that they should be good representatives of Virginska, Örebro and Sweden. These criteria are well established and communicated in advance to ensure that everyone has the same opportunity to participate. Teachers and students cultural, social, historical and linguistic preparations are included. After homecoming there will be an evaluation, monitoring of assessment and dissemination. Teachers’ result of our project will be disseminated at in-service-days where information is shared and discussed with colleagues from other upper secondary schools and through participation in trade fairs, conferences, branch councils, lectures and media. The students dissemination will be within and outside our school including at fairs, exhibitions, open houses, media /press, social media, visits to political committees and universities.
In the future we look forward to continuously develop our internationalisation to be a blue chip school. We also want to expand the number of partners in Europe, where teachers vocational sector partners, and students can be part of different networks for continuous development of our programmes