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Internacionalizacija i modernizacija škole kao pre..
Internacionalizacija i modernizacija škole kao preduvjet kvalitete ustanove i njene obrazovne djelatnosti (s naglaskom na integraciju djece s posebnim potrebama i poteškoćama u usvajanju osnovnih vještina)
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Sep 1, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
Through this project, we wanted to provide a professional development for our teachers and our management in order to improve the quality of our secondary vocational school and its educational activities. Students who enroll in our school have low academic achievement from primary school and a low motivation in learning. Among them there is a large number of students with special needs and disabilities to whom our general education teachers, who are not specially trained for their needs, must adapt teaching content and approaches to help these children achieve as much success as possible in mastering key competences. Although our teachers worked very hard, the progress was not often seen.Therefore we needed a better education in the field of special needs children's integration.
Children with disabilities, as well as the other children, have low competence in foreign languages as a result of their low motivation in learning . Being aware of the importance of learning foreign languages,the development of language competence of our students was crucial for us in order to make our students more competitive in our local market as well as the broader European market.
Most of our children have never had any opportunity to travel abroad and meet other ways of living and cultures. Most of our teachers have never had an opportunity to have a professional development abroad and meet good European practices. Since this project we haven't had any experience in the international projects and our teachers haven't shown any interest in any kind of cooperation in this field. One of the reasons was their poor knowledge of foreign languages. Therefore, we found necessary to improve the language competence of our staff as well as to train them how to design, plan and coordinate international projects.Our big wish was to establish a cooperation with other European schools and try to realize a common project that would enable both our students and our teachers to improve their language skills, meet good European practice and become active participants of the European educational system.
Our teachers make a big effort to organise and implement teaching and to promote our school. Every year we work really hard to have a required number of students enrolled in our school and to have all our courses filled up.We hoped that modernisation and internalisation would increase the reputation of our school and make it a more attractive and a better place for all its participants.
As mentioned above, we needed to make our school more international and more modern at managing and teaching with better strategies for children with disabilities.Consequently, we designed a two year project based on the professional development of our staff and on getting to know good European practice through in-service trainings as well as through job shadowing.The project lasted two years and comprised four activities: three structured courses in the first year and job shadowing in the second year. Each course was planned for one participant and jobshadowing was planned for four participants. We did the course for European secondary Headteachers in Southampton, the course for English teachers in London, the course for international project coordinators in Port and job shadowing in a secondary school in Milan for our Croatian teacher, English teacher, Maths teacher and our school psychologist. Our partner school Oriani-Mazzin has years of a successful experience with the integration of children with disabilities and a successful organisation of teaching, so our teachers had the opportunity to learn a lot about strategies of integration and good practice of their host school.
Apart from learning about modern methods and technologies in the teaching of foreign languages, good European practices in the school management and successful strategies of integration of children with disabilities, a realized cooperation of our school with partner schools of the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Denmark, that has resulted with an approved Erasmus+KA2 project, is considered to be a great success of this project. Although this project is just the beginning of a very nice story about European cooperation, we believe that we have already taken a big step in the field of the internationalisation of our school, its modernisation and the improvement of strategies of integration of children with disabilities.There is still a long way in front of us. However, we are glad that we have already achieved a better motivation in learning foreign languages and better strategies of integration of children with disabilities by this project and we have created a prerequisite to make our school more beautiful, more attractive, more dynamique and a happier place for all its participants.
In the longer term the school has become an active participant in the European educational community and encouraged to further strategic planning of its professional development.