21st century skills Erasmus Project

Project Title

21st century skills

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; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

With this project we wanted to foster the skills every student needs for being well prepared for the time at and after school. With the help of new media and ICT we focussed on critical thinking-, communicating-, collaborating-, creative thinking- and career and life skill. If students leave school being unaware of their skills and unaware of the competences that our century looks for, they will be unprepared for the challenges of society and workforce.
School dropout has been identified as one of the main challenges in education faced by European countries. For the majority of young people, leaving education and training is both a result of educational, psychological and social problems and a cause of continuous social insecurity. So this is also a topic we concentrated on. The Corona pandamic forced us to realize its increasing necessity.
Students at the age of 14 years from Germany, Finland, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece took part in our project. Although only 2 or 3 students per school could travel abroad, the target groups who did not get any grant but indirectly benefitted over the short and long term from the project were many teachers from involved schools, stakeholders from local enterprises, official bodies and many students from the partner schools, with a special involvement of socio-economically disadvantaged, refugees and asylum seekers: the officially selected students had the chance to visit foreign countries, but many of their classmates contributed by participating to the transversal activities developed during the 3 years and to the meetings and workshops which were held after each exchange by travelling students, who became tutors themselves to share the gained information and experiences with their peers. Each seminar was a means to promote the culture of inclusion and active citizenship: travelling students talked about the human relationships developed within different cultures, presenting commented photos showing how easy it is to come into contact and respect what is different from us.
Activity blocks divided in terms (before each mobility):
1. Presenting the project
2. Theoretical studies
3. School Plan to avoid ESL
4. Innovative approach; Project Based Learning.
5. Digitalization plan
6. Agreements and dissemination of conclusions.
7. Additional activities during the prolongation because of Corona:
All this work will be available to the community of teachers at European level, carrying out a series of informative posters within the project.
Before each mobility, the host country will prepare a planning about the activities to be developed in its school focused on motivating students, and that can be considered innovative. Then, the rest of the partners will put them into practice before the mobility and will prepare a report on achievements, difficulties and improvement proposals that will be presented in the mobility. They will also record a video showing how they put those activities into practice. During each mobility, a meeting schedule will be established. Once the presentations of the students have been made, the teachers will elaborate a poster promoting the motivating and innovative activity worked during that mobility. The poster will then be digitized by the ICT team and disseminated by the team responsible for dissemination.
LONG TERM IMPACT – QUANTITATIVE INDICATORS
– students’ learning results: students’ improvements were evaluated by using our national assessment tools; we compared each school results
– number of new cross-curricular activities developed in each school after the project end to be used for future projects
LONG TERM IMPACT – QUALITATIVE INDICATORS
– higher involvement of students and teachers in social and sustainable development policies
– improvement of local curricula (both participating and non participating schools)
– improvement of learning/teaching methodologies
– increased European cooperation
– improved results in students’ grades as school (as regards English, ICT and technical subjects)
By rising our students’ motivation we succeeded in convincing more students than before to end their studies with a certificate in Secondary Education. We identified the current dropout rates of each participating school and compared with national figures, exchanged good practices and dealt with new media, used a range of strategies to deal with school dropouts and attendance issues, raised awareness to help students appreciate the value of education, involved all kind of students, identified and applied strategies to cope with bullying/cyberbullying and identified strategies to self motivate students.
Instead of a real lesson plan booklet we developed different digital material which should be a guide for good practices and which can be used at all participating schools.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 187230 Eur

Project Coordinator

Integrierte Gesamtschule Grünthal – mit gymnasialer Oberstufe- & Country: DE

Project Partners

• 1st Gymnasium of Galatsi, Athens
• Agrupamento de Escolas Professor Paula Nogueira
• Harjun koulu
• Collège Edouard GLISSANT
• PUNTA LARGA