Building Skillful Thinking in Children + Learn, Explore and Assess How Thinking Key Competences Work Erasmus Project

Project Title

Building Skillful Thinking in Children +
Learn, Explore and Assess How Thinking Key Competences Work

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Research and innovation

Project Summary

Ramsta school, Community of Uppsala, Sweden, has been working with Socratic Seminars to make students think more skillfully for many years in cooperation with PhD Ann Pihlgren. Lope de Vega International School in Benidorm, Spain, has been working with Thinking-Based Learning developed by Dr. Robert Swartz for many years. Both schools got connected through PhD Ann Pihlgren. The staff from Ramsta school visited Lope de Vega to get informed about how they work with their education and Teaching Based Learning. We got interested in each other’s work about thinking and decided to apply for an Erasmus + project together named “Building Skillful Thinking in Children”. The project started in September 2018 and will end in August 2020. We have visited each other’s schools and provided education in both methods/skills. From Sweden 25 teachers have been involved and from Spain 15 teachers. We have found that both methods complement each other and tried them out with our students. We feel that we need to practice and develop in a deeper way this teaching approach and go further in the assessment of thinking and results. That is why we apply for this new project, “Building Skillful Thinking in Children +, Learn, Explore and Assess how Thinking Key Competences Work”. We count with the valuable help and expertise of PhD Ann Pihlgren, who will support and guide us to develop the project in a research to see that the merged methods will make a difference in students’ way of thinking.

The objectives of this project are an extension of the ones proposed in the previous project and will allow both schools to continue learning from each other to get a deeper understanding of both methods, Socratic Seminars and Thinking-Based Learning and merge and integrate them into the schools curriculum for a deep and long-lasting educational transformation. Other objectives included in this project are to actively drive the teachers’ professional development, to ensure that the students will develop their ability to think in a deeper analytical, critical, creative, innovative and emotional way, understanding diversity in all its aspects, to develop tools with the students collaboration to evaluate thinking and put them into practice when developing all the teaching units already created and to conduct a research that will show the results of all the process. These results will be presented not only in our home countries, Spain and Sweden, but also in European and international forums related to education to show new ways of implementing innovative teaching-learning approaches.

Students from age 6-12 from both schools will be involved in the project, accompanied by Swedish and Spanish teachers, trained and educated to apply these two thinking methods in all areas of study.

Ten mobility meetings have been planned during the project, five in Spain and four in Sweden, They all have different purposes, activities and expected results, and two of them will be very special as they will include students from each country. During the mobility meetings in Spain, Swedish teachers will discover more ways to teach curricular content through higher order thinking strategies developed in the Thinking-Based Learning method, and during the mobility meetings in Sweden, Spanish teachers will learn more about philosophy methods to deepen their knowledge about how to plan and facilitate the Socratic Seminars. Educators will also create together an assessment plan that will be tested, analyzed and revised in order to find the way to evaluate thinking in an efficient way, and they will gather data though all the process to feed a scientific funded research so as to show the results and prove the effectiveness of such thinking methods merging. All this, accompanied by active methodologies that will imply cooperative work, collaborative thinking, active questioning and visible thinking among others.

In the last mobility, teachers from Sweden and Spain will travel to Brussels. There, they will explore new horizons and possibilities with the help of other European experts on philosophy and teaching thinking in the classrooms. The school representatives will also present the Handbook, the final product that will collect all the activities and outcomes of the project, to the Spanish, and if possible, Swedish Euro representatives at the European Parliament . This will be a fantastic “gold pin” to close the work of the last four years about something that has never been done before: merging the TBL and Socratic Seminars thinking methods, implementing this merging in the classroom, becoming part of the core curriculum of the two schools, developing materials and rubrics to assess thinking and conducting a research to verify the effectiveness and results of this merging.

We expect all these actions to have a long-term high impact not only in Ramsta School and Lope de Vega International School, but also in the international educational community.

Project Website

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/139122/home

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 43812 Eur

Project Coordinator

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

Project Partners

• Ramsta skola