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PLURILINGÜISMO E INNOVACIÓN: UNA PUERTA HACIA EUROPA
Start date: Jun 1, 2016, End date: May 31, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

I.E.S Ximen d’Urrea is a secondary school where E.S.O., Baccalaureate and Vocational Studies are offered. Situated in L’Alcora – a small location in the province of Castellón – it includes students from different towns in the region. We are 47 teachers for 421 students that mainly come from an average to low socio-economic level families (the school is rated as ISEC - SocioEconomic and Cultural Index - 2 out of 5). These students need all possible institutional support in order to access education and the labour world in the same conditions as the other citizens. Therefore, we always try to participate in several projects which can be useful to motivate the students and give them opportunities that otherwise would not be available to them.In a world where education is highly valued and being a basic requirement for accessing the labour market, our school presents a high percentage of academic failure which is above the average and therefore above the desirable. Moreover, taking into account that we belong to a united Europe, we have to consider the knowledge of languages as a key aspect in education at schools. From this starting point, we put forward a project that tends to focus at the same time on both aspects mentioned above.Our objective is to try to reduce the number of students who leave our educative system too early and to improve our results using different tools and new innovative methodologies such as the Project Based Learning framework, the use of new technologies in the classroom and/or leadership and motivation techniques. We also want to consolidate the multilingual project we have already started, since its aim is focused on a group of students who will receive tuition in English as a vehicular language in at least two different areas of the curriculum. Teachers and students join this programme voluntarily as we consider that it guarantees higher success rates.This project, which represents a professional challenge for teachers, has as its main objective to improve both our students' learning and professional expectations as well as to motivate them to remain for a longer period of time within the educative system, thus improving their opportunities of success and facilitating their future internationalisation. There are nine teachers directly involved in the project who are supported by the rest of the teaching staff and management team. All of them are secondary school teachers of different areas, ranging from humanistic to scientific subjects, and they have extensive experience in education as well as willingness to collaborate and undertake innovative approaches. They also have a high degree of awareness about students' needs within the school context and meet the required English language skills. Their training needs in this context align with the scheduled mobility activities that consist on:• Three study stays that will enable the teachers to improve their knowledge on the Finish and British educative systems.• A course on leadership and motivation skills for teachers• Two courses on the use of new technologies, with complementary approaches that work towards the same end.• A course to reinforce basic knowledge of the English language and two courses about creative and innovative materials for the teaching of languages that will be taken by English secondary school teachers.Once considered the convenience of participating in this new project, we decided to inform about it to the rest of the teachers in our school. From here, a group of teachers became directly involved in the project and are now willing to take part in the training activities mentioned above. Our short to mid term objective is to improve our students' knowledge and to put into practice the newly learnt techniques at the same time that we consolidate other teaching methods and strategies within innovative contexts of use. Thus, collaborative group work will be encouraged to start with. Also, the number of teachers actively participating in the initial project could be increased as the multilingual project develops and the training activities become more demanding.Finally and in relation to students, we pursue two main objectives. First, we expect to motivate them to remain in the educative system for a longer period of time, which in turn will reduce the high degree of dropout students. Secondly, students' use of English as a vehicular language will improve and, in the mid term, will lead to enhance both their language skills as well as their motivation towards becoming part of an intercultural Europe. In the long term, the project will open up new possibilities for our students’ access to the labour market, clearing their way towards the accomplishment of university degrees and facilitating their international mobility. Obviously and without doubt, this fact represents highly valuable enriching opportunities for students in our school.
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