Achieving together Erasmus Project

Project Title

Achieving together

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 : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Creativity and culture; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

The project ‘Achieving Together’ responded to needs which have been identified not only in the participating schools, but by the European educational community as a whole. Raising and maintaining standards in key skills and foreign language learning is embedded in the school development plans of all partners and we are constantly striving to develop our methods and find creative and innovative ways of engaging pupils. Pupils who have strong links to their learning community (class and school), who have teachers with the resources, creativity and freedom to respond to their individual learning needs in a practical way, are less likely to become disenchanted with education.

Objectives: To share and develop planning and teaching practices which build learning communities where each individual can feel fully integrated. With this as our guiding principle, we have developed a portfolio of lesson plans with hands on activities and practical outcomes, and demonstrated lessons and outcomes in our international joint workshops, across various curriculum subjects.

There are 6 partners involved in this Project: The schools in the UK, France, Germany and Hungary are coeducational Waldorf Schools for children aged 3 – 18, and the two schools in Turkey are TED schools, one for children aged 5 – 13, the other 14 – 18. The High School in Turkey and the Waldorf School in France have not been involved in a transnational project before.
All schools give a high level of support to pupils with fewer opportunities, and the ratio of participants with such needs was indeed the same or higher than that ratio throughout the partner schools. This is because we ensured that pupils with special needs or fewer opportunities in the home schools of a project week received every support and encouragement to take part, with great success.

The main activities of the project were:

-10 short term joint workshops. Three of these were language workshops in French, English and German on different themes, which pupils will have prepared in their foreign language lessons leading up to the mobility. The other workshops took place in English and the themes were taken from the key skills areas: Literacy, numeracy, communication (friendship), employability and entrepreneurship. All workshops were built on, and demonstrated elements of, lessons which took place at the schools prior to the international meetings. In this way, reinforcement and sharing of our work in individual schools took place on an international level.

-7 exchanges for 6 weeks each, with the objective of raising standards in foreign language learning, self confidence, ability to live in a foreign country, and employability.

-Staff training event: In the third year of the project we put together our research, insights and new practices to create training resources for teachers, addressing areas such as classroom management, creative planning for lessons with practical outcomes and catering for individual needs within a class community. There were 15 participants on the initial training event. Further training is already planned in the UK (autumn 2017) and Germany (new year 2018), on child observation and tools for responding to individual needs for better integration.

Results:

– Videos produced by students on the themes of the foreign language workshops. These have been uploaded to the project website.
– A portfolio of lesson plans for the teaching of literacy, numeracy, foreign languages and sciences where pupils work towards a common goal and produce a practical outcome. Uploaded to the website
– A collection of internal and external resources to support teachers in making better provision for all pupils, including those who lack connection to their work and peers and/or are in danger of early school leaving; staff training resources for the wider teaching community beyond the partner schools on these areas. This will be a subject in ongoing inhouse staff meetings and development.

Potential long term benefits: All partner schools have managed to integrate the project methods into practice. Teachers are reporting better engagement in language lessons, including from pupils with low ability in key skills. Participants of the three day training feel they have gained more understanding for pupils with disengagement issues, and as a result are better able to support them.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 399645 Eur

Project Coordinator

Ringwood Waldorf School & Country: UK

Project Partners

• TED ALIAGA KOLEJI VAKFI OZEL LISESI
• Freie Waldorfschule Saar-Hunsrück
• Obudai Waldorf Altalanos Iskola, Gimnazium es Alapfoku Muveszeti Iskola
• Ecole Michaël
• TED ALIAGA KOLEJI VAKFI OZEL ORTAOKULU