THE TOWER OF EXPECTATIONS Erasmus Project

Project Title

THE TOWER OF EXPECTATIONS

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: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage

Project Summary

“The TOWER of EXPECTATIONS” project was a partnership between The Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Spain (Mallorca), Turkey and Italy.
One of the project aims was to encourage each partner’s school and local community to deal with culture heritage joints and perform concrete actions to improve the knowledge and its use in each school, by working together in promoting exchange of cultural and historic values of the participating countries.
The second main objective was improving various competencies of students and teachers. The training of teachers was especially in the field of emotional education. All teachers who participated in the project activities attended education about emotional literacy in two schools that provided short-term training programmes (Croatia, Turkey). The rest of the partner schools enhanced their curriculum with various emotional educational tips and didactic material for enhancing emotional literacy, and shared and presented that with partner schools during mobilities and/or online meetings (because of the pandemic Covid – 19). That way, teachers from partner schools could pass on new knowledge and skills and implement it in their school’s work and curriculum.

Through the research of school teams composed of pupils and teachers, we worked on these planned topics:
Science and Inventors,
Composers, Music and Dance,
Literature and Writers,
Architecture and Architects,
Games,
Festivities and Cultural Heritage,
which all related to everyday life and pupils found them interesting and empowering.

At each school we put the findings and outputs of our research into a skyscraper (TOWER) that was continually built for three years during the project, and that skyscraper was a „first“ common unifying symbol of our project. The skyscraper was a symbol of the rapidly evolving world, where modern digital technologies, robotics and electronics and core human abilities and skills are inevitably intertwined. The plurality of 6 floors (for 6 topics/partner schools) offered enough space for project outcomes and results.
The team of teachers and pupils demonstrated during the project the ability and competences like teamwork, presentation ability, ability to communicate in a foreign language, ability to use ICT and work skills.
This project included 6 schools, 2500 pupils (actively 400, the rest passively) and 200 teachers (actively 70, the rest passively).
In Croatian school – kindergarten – all planned activities were adapted for the level of pre-primary education. This school with the experience and work of a highly educated team and a school psychologist educated in the field of emotional literacy was a leader of the teachers training in the area of emotional literacy and its application to everyday work practice.
Mobilities
There were 6 planned mobilities, only 4 were implemented. Two mobilities could not be carried out due to the Covid -19 pandemic, not allowed travelling and announced lockdowns, which started just before our 5th meeting in Italy (16th – 20th March 2020).
Children from the Croatian school did not take part in the mobility, because of their age, as well as pupils from a Turkish school where the Erasmus+ national rules do not allow for the mobility of children under 12 years of age.
We wanted to secure the rest of two mobilities (Italian and Mallorcan school) in the third year of the project (2020/2021), but it was not possible due to various measures at individual schools or thanks to online learning at some of the partner schools.
The project website is available at http://project-tower.eu, where photos, activities and products etc. are presented.
At the end of the report, I would like to say that the project was successful, despite the difficulties caused by the Covid – 19 pandemic. We managed to implement all planned tasks and outputs, only it was not possible to implement two mobilities. We hope that the project helped increase the children’s social and emotional skills, and also their knowledge in many areas of both local and European context.

Project Website

http://project-tower.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 106404,65 Eur

Project Coordinator

Zakladni skola Varnsdorf, Edisonova 2821, okres Decin, prispevkova organizace & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• CEIP Melcior Rosselló i Simonet
• Djecji vrtic Sisak Stari
• Tiszta Forrás Waldorf Általános Iskola, Alapfokú Muvészeti Iskola és Óvoda
• Dr.Cahit Unver Primary School
• Scuola Paola Di Rosa