Building Skillful Thinking in Children Erasmus Project

Project Title

Building Skillful Thinking in Children

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: Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

After two years working together and learning from each other, teachers from Lope de Vega international School in Spain and Ramsta School in Sweden can say that carrying out this project has been a fantastic and rewarding experience. Building Skillful Thinking in Children, as the title of our project describes, has been our main objective and we strongly believe that we have been able to develop different ways to provide the students with the abilities to be good creative and critical thinkers in several areas, and transfer their knowledge in thinking to many varied situations in life.

This has been possible thanks to the blending of the two thinking methods used in each of the schools: Thinking-Based Learning and Socratic Seminars. We have had training activities for teachers in both countries to learn about their theoretical foundation and the opportunity to observe and practise with students of different ages, levels and needs. This happened during the 8 physical mobilities that took place from October 2018 to January 2020. In these mobilites, there was always a scheduled time for training, observation and practice in the classroom, feedback, planning thinking lessons with Socratic Seminars and TBL, and designing the teaching units. Thanks to the incredible connection between teachers from both countries and a supreme eagerness to learn from each other, we designed up to four teaching units for students 6-12, dealing with various topics such as the environment, health, emotions, language and art.

We had the valuable collaboration of Dr. Ann Pihlgren from the Ignite Research Institute in Sweden, who guided us through the creation of very useful documents from the teaching units planning template to rubrics for class observation among others. And we cannot forget the contribution from Dr. Eleanor Dougherty, author of Assignments Matter and expert in lesson planning, who helped us design the lesson progression template that allowed us to reflect in a deeper way about the purpose and development of the activities included.

Due to the pandemic situation caused by COVID-19 we were unable to make the last two mobility meetings, and instead, we kept on collaborating and did all the training sessions online. It is true that we missed the contact with the students to observe them in action and interact with them, but this unexpected situation opened new ways of working together. As a final dissemination activity, we participated as presenters in the 5th Teachers Conference about thinking, this time organised online in August 2020. It was a unique forum attended by 300 participants from all over the world that gave us the chance to explain the project, talk about the teaching units, the blending of TBL and Socratic Seminars and its impact on the students.

During this two-year project we have used several European platforms to prepare, implement and disseminate our work. eTwinning has been one of the pillars of the project in means of communication and collaboration, allowing us to share experiences, discuss issues related to the project development and collect the material produced. Erasmus+ Project Results Platform has also been a fantastic tool to recall all templates, teaching units, questionnaires, videos. Presentations, meeting minutes, etc. produced along the process.

After the involvement of 40 teachers and more than 300 students in this extraordinary project, we can firmly state that both parties, Lope de Vega International School and Ramsta School have enriched their educational models and have gained new knowledge, giving additional tools to work within thinking from different perspectives. Furthermore, we are sure that thanks to the work of these two years, students from both schools will upgrade their thinking skills and become better thinkers. Our expectations have been met and the experience has been very fruitful, totally surpassing our initial plans.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 46793,5 Eur

Project Coordinator

C.E. Lope de Vega SAU & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Ramsta skola