Quality exchange between skilled teachers Erasmus Project

Project Title

Quality exchange between skilled teachers

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

The QUEST project is focused on improving, refreshing the existing educational programme, primarily in kindergartens, and on adding value to it by introducing cultural dimensions and early foreign language acquisition elements. Combining experience, knowledge, skills of three different institutions that represent pre-primary education will lead us to the improvement and enrichment of the existing pedagogical approach called Project Work with a Puppet, developed by the Trnovo Kindergarten which turned out as a successful, well accepted, open learning and teaching method in Slovenian kindergarten. The renewed and upgraded pedagogical approach will incorporate good practices of participating institutions and set the open ground for quality exchange between skilled teachers and other pedagogical staff. It will promote international collaboration and foster awareness of multiple cultures and languages. The project directly addresses three institutions, their staff workers and children. The learning and teaching activities will be carried out on the institutional level by 33 educators from three institutions. The participants will contribute to the project outcomes by their multidisciplinary skills. On one hand, participants are skilled Pedagogical Puppeteers, they master the action-research approach, have the skills to make the pedagogical puppet and on the other hand, they have knowledge in the field of multicultural education, art and special pedagogy.
Project activities will be planned throughout the whole year and provide continuity of the whole project. Each activity will upgrade the previous one and add to the value of the entire project and its final outcome. The project’s heart will be a literary story, which is split on individual topical stages (4) comprising individual materials, conundrums, research questions and other balanced curricular fields. The project as a whole will thus consist of several stages. In preoperational stage, we will determine the subject and materials of research within the literary-didactical story, we will decide on the main protagonist (the puppet) and the message we would like to pass on. A story formed in this way will represent a common thread of the annual planning and a long-term motivation for children and also educators and parents. The pre-stage will be reserved for introducing the main character into classes and leave time to embrace it wholeheartedly. In stage one, the participants/educators who will play their role as Pedagogical Puppeteers together with children launch the inquiry of a particular material and curricular area. The second and third stage will upgrade the inquiry based learning by adding new materials and rise new research questions. The individual stages will offer enough space for autonomy, creativity, adaptation and dispossession according to individual group of children or developmental characteristics of individual age group of children and will follow the overall goals of the project. Each stage of a literary-didactical story will produce its own “final” product made by children in interaction with their educators and peers and it will be a result of their mutual inquiry and collaboration between participants.
With this project, we will pursue the contemporary didactical principles that we understand as an openness for: novelties, alternative, new techniques and experiments, active role of a child and educator, developing capacities for lifelong learning (motivation and strategies), developing higher forms of thinking, care for a comprehensive development of a child through the development of competences that include knowledge, skills, point of views, attitude etc.
The implementation of the activities will result in a common booklet, document-ation that will be composed of the records showing professionally reach structure of the content planning, the course of learning and teaching activities and the process of research activities. It will focus also on the role of a child and his development and on the role of an educator in the process of research. The document would serve as a guide for other institutions willing to embark on a QUEST for open, multicultural, qualitative education.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 49462 Eur

Project Coordinator

Vrtec Trnovo & Country: SI

Project Partners

• Ecole Maternelle Françoise Dolto
• 2nd Nipiagogeio of Afandou