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Hyvinvoiva Kaakkurin maailmankansalainen
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Kaakkuri School is the first school in the city of Oulu that has been built as a comprehensive school. The school has acted as a pioneer in building the functions and culture of a comprehensive school that includes both primary and secondary school under one roof. Kaakkuri School has orientated itself towards international activity. The staff is relatively young on average, very active, and eager to develop both its expertise and the functions of the school. The impacts of international courses and training will be long-lasting within the school, as well as within the city of Oulu, as the school is the main school of its district. Kaakkuri School has been selected as one of the two “Welfare Schools” in the city of Oulu. This pilot project is one of the focus areas of the city and the municipal educational administration. In addition, the operational principle of our school promotes the well-being of students, staff and the society as a whole. The main purpose of the above-mentioned pilot project is to build a functioning model for welfare schools in Oulu. The model will be disseminated both nationally and internationally in the future. The aim of a school distributing the ideas of well-being is to break old, stiff structures and functions and to look for new, flexible practices to replace them. To be able to find brave openings for discussions and alternative ways of working, it is sensible for us to get to know the European points of view. Personal contacts with colleagues from other EU countries are important for us, because they help us to deepen our professional knowledge, to create new social networks and to build a European identity. Our objective is to keep our school as a innovative organisation and to get international elements into the development process of a welfare school; to get familiar with functional teaching methods and approaches which strengthen and develop group work; to improve the language skills and cultural knowledge of our staff; to develop the contents of school subjects and the collaboration between different school subjects and to prevent social exclusion. Our school did choose 14 staff members to participate in the project. Two of them are in the board of directors of the school, and the rest are classroom and subject teachers. We consider it important for our staff to educate itself as extensively as possible. This helps our staff to take into consideration the collaboration between different school subjects and different grades of teaching. This makes it possible to change our ways of working in order to improve the Welfare School. This also enables an effective distribution of knowledge and experiences with other stakeholders outside the school. Although the Finnish school has succeeded in studies comparing learning results, we still have to work on how students could enjoy their learning environment more and how their well-being could be improved. For this international project, we did include courses that deal with the following themes: school management; functional and communal teaching methods that create commitment among students and teachers; cultural knowledge; improving language skills and creating a European identity for the school. The course contents that we did chose have helped us to respond to the challenges we face in reaching our objectives.
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