Be Yourself Proof Yourself Erasmus Project

Project Title

Be Yourself Proof Yourself

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: Access for disadvantaged; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

Our Project mainly targeted to students during their puberty period and facing family problems such as divorced or one parent famılıes. We focused on these groups while after surveys we detected low self-confidence on these students that can somehow lead to early school leaving. Furthermore, we recorded from journal references that students with low school acceptance are not developing harmonically all their intelligences and during their adult life is more possible to divorce suffer from adult depression or mental illness, and practice violence. In every school day attitude, these students seem to have communication problems with other students and usually have no or only one friend. Their introvert is also reflected within their families and their classes. One of the most unwanted results is low academic success for these student groups. This finding was confirmed by tests in all partner schools, where almost 20% of these students have indeed low skills in several subjects. We then conducted a plan to reduce or even face this problem. Our major goal was to develop all kind of skills for these students, communication, collaboration, expression, digital skills, foreign language skills, and emotional intelligence, friendship, orientation and socialization skills.
According to the strategies of EU 2020, we supported students in their social life and academic level always in cooperation with our partners. What we did? We dedicated each student’s mobility into specific activities aiming to cultivate relative skills. We have prepared meetings in order to involve students actively in music groups, drama activities, performances, art lessons, ICT, sports developing multiple intelligences and enabling them to get involved and interrelated in several school subjects by using the cross cultural design. According to bibliography such activities are improving self-confidence of students, developing social skills and cultivating multiple intelligences. After all these activities new pedagogical approaches supported and educational material produced (uploaded in the relative ERASMUS+ web page), available ongoing to all interested educators, teachers and students.
Apart from the materialized outputs we must refer and mention the intangible benefits. Framed within ICT application such as Facebook page or e-twinning page students from different countries developed relationships maintained mainly throw instant messaging or chatting. We can mention that students really introvert in their schools with no relationships, developed within a single mobility time strong relationship with students from other countries. This was especially mentioned by all teachers revealing the true success of our project. Furthermore, activities such as street soccer or effectively time spending environments (coffee breaks, theater watching, and sightseeing) assisted students’ social skills helping them forming their recognition profile. At the end of the project we really recorded that in many schools early leaving was reduced, especially if the students participating in our project were carefully chosen.
On the other hand we must mention that the academic skills of many of these students were really improved. We can mention that many students especially from the Greek partner school succeeded in their exams joining now the Greek Universities. Apart from these records we can refer to all partner schools ensuring that similar findings were observed. It seems that socialization and participation to mobilities gives students extra motivation to school life in all its aspects, even in academics. Of course practicing on special subjects and activities and not just approaching them theoretically gives special interests on Physical Education Lessons, Language Lessons, Math, Music, Social Sciences and Science. We approached these subjects under the prospective of organized courses by volunteer teachers. These courses were mainly ICT based motivating students to develop both their academic achievement and physiological well-being in their life. All partner countries supported ICT based content development integrating students into a modern education approach, mainly aiming to make them aware of their talents, gain trust and respect themselves.
As a conclusion we must mention that we recorded an increase to the rate of students’’ social skills of almost 40%, and a respective decrease of the rate of low skills on basic subjects up to 20%. This was mainly achieved because of the detailed and well organized preparatory and evaluation meetings of the national coordinators (teachers). All meetings were very well prepared and additionally the Italian partner OpenCom provided its experience and know-how to integrate positively all intellectual activities. Their knowledge strongly assisted our Project towards students’ motto: “I am recognized, I have capabilities, I trust myself and I am aware of my responsibilities. Finally they are able to say “I am really hap

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 169480 Eur

Project Coordinator

Toki Ulucan Ortaokulu & Country: TR

Project Partners

• OPENCOM i.s.s.c.
• Zespol Szkol Sportowych Gimnazjum Sportowe nr 1
• Zakladni skola a materska skola Cesky Tesin Hrabina, prispevkova organizace
• Scoala Gimnaziala Adrian Paunescu
• Model Experimental High School of University of Patras