Approaching Better Teaching Erasmus Project

Project Title

Approaching Better Teaching

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Pedagogy and didactics; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

This partnership focuses on exchanging and building ideas and innovative practices on how to find a fruitful balance between student oriented teaching methods and more teacher centered ones. Across Europe there are both teachers who sometimes teach a bit too far along the continuum towards the teacher centered end, where the teaching sometimes gets too theoretical, where the students are not that active and are not doing practical stuff. There are also teachers that have gone too far towards the other end and have handed over too much responsibility for the learning on the students.
Students need both well-structured knowledge transmission from an expert as the teacher as well as possibilities to use new knowledge in practical situations such as experiments, discussions or problem-solving. In our partnership, we want to learn from each other’s daily teaching and to enable ourselves, by comparing our different practices, to reflect on our own practices. This opens for thought-through testing and implementing innovative practices that have optimal balance between student centered and teacher centered methods. This ratio depends on deep social structures of schools and their education systems teaching traditions, national curricula, exams, norms, expectations from the local community and classroom routines.
Through shadowing in other teaching contexts, through discussions and comparison of different approaches and through co-planned teaching activities (on eTwinning and during teacher exchanges) the participants have reflected critically upon their own teaching practices. With help of experiences gained from teaching in the partner schools, teachers have visualized what has been taken for granted in their own teaching practices. This awareness was a foundation to transform teaching to find a better balance.
The different methods we would like to apply:
• Project approach, building more projects into our education
• Deepening applying ICT tools and programmes we have met during mobilities, lifting them in our teaching practice, for example Worksheet Crafter
• Trying good exercises we have seen during the lessons such as tests at the end of the lessons, use exercise banks on tablets
• Applying pedagogical assistants helping the teachers job in the lessons

Our activities are about exploring the range of different methods and approaches in the three subject fields. By job shadowing and discussing our observations, we learned about alternative ways to teach and organize schools. Through the variation of the school, teachers have expanded their repertoire of teaching approaches and develop their action competence to find a suitable ratio.
• We got to know widely and use the teacher centered and student centered teaching methods appropriately.
• We got to know (and we are learning and developing) that pedagogical attitude when we should give more responsibility to our students during the teaching process and when we should take it back.
Our students gained knowledge the participant counties’ culture, geography and national food.
• Our students made projects about our national food, they collected the recipes
• They made presentations and videos about making these food and we uploaded them on the e-twinning site.
• They made other projects and videos about our school and uploaded them too.
• They got to know our partners’ national food and culture.
• Our students built relationship with our partner institutions’ students through online activities and they developed their ICT skills through all these process. Some of them have continued contact now at SnapChat
Our teachers got to know useful teaching strategies through effective knowledge sharing.
• We gained experiences about the Swedish, Polish, Hungarian and Croatian schools’ learning organization and their teachers’ work.
• We learned how to organize international meetings.
• We learned how to upload projects and virtual materials on the E-twinning website, padlets and facebook.
• We became a European Talent Point.

By teaching, we prepare young people for their future life. Our main objective was to develop teachers’ competences to find the most suiting ratio between different approaches during classroom work. We can say that this project, the mobilities, taking part in this programme have had great effects to our view of teaching. As we shared experiences in many fields and we gained lots of knowledge about the other countries’ teaching methods, we were filled up with new motivation, new energy to try all these new ideas that we have seen abroad. These teachers adopted this knowledge into their teaching practice. We are braver to use the time frame of project approaching teaching when we make our timetable and subject division. We locally developed a new good method for organizing free time. The school management allowed all these organizational changes (within certain limits) to realize new methods. Some changed the permanent presence of ICT methods, remodelling classroom furniture, as seen in partner countries.

Project Website

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/74726/home

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 79182,38 Eur

Project Coordinator

Errarps skola & Country: SE

Project Partners

• Osnovna skola don Mihovila Pavlinovica
• Zespol Szkol w Dobrzejewicach
• Szerencsi Rakoczi Zsigmond Reformatus Ket Tanitasi Nyelvu Altalanos Iskola és Alapfoku Muveszeti Iskola