Futureskills21: Towards the acquisition of 21st-century skills through effective and innovative learning, teaching and assessment Erasmus Project

Project Title

Futureskills21: Towards the acquisition of 21st-century skills through effective and innovative learning, teaching and assessment

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

If we could develop a new pedagogy that would help us rise to the challenge of school systems learning from each other at every level and new pedagogies emerging in widely distributed places across Europe and even the globe, we would see a huge acceleration in the improvement of education outcomes – instead of the frustratingly slow incremental gains of recent decades, if any. In many cases there is even a status quo or a setback. Moreover, we would see learning outcomes that would include not only literacy and numeracy, although they are vital, but also those wider, less well-defined outcomes such as problem-solving, collaboration, creativity, thinking in different ways, and building effective relationships and teams. Therefore we chose “Futureskills21: Towards the acquisition of 21st-century skills through effective and innovative learning, teaching and assessment” to be our project title.

Thanks to our network of 10 schools, organisations and various external partners we wanted to promote the achievement of relevant and high quality skills and competences among pupils and staff and support our pupils in acquiring and developing key competences – including basic, transversal and soft skills, entrepreneurial, foreign language and digital skills – in order to foster employability, socio-educational and professional development.

Our tangible project outcome are an assessment tool box for 21st-century competences. We have called it “Track and Teach”. The platform can be visited online on www.tracknteach.eu. We also used the “learning outcome” approach in our educational and training activities and assessed their quality and relevance in order to strategically implement them. In order to achieve this, we organised two joint-staff training events and one virtual mobilities of pupils to work together on various types of project work and to assess these joint activities using competence evaluation sets. Unfortunately, due to the covid pandemic we had to cancel two blended mobilities of learners, which had a large impact on the execution of several activities, but despite the difficulties, we managed to deliver a quality project outcome.

In our project, we wanted to explore the use and exchange of innovative methods and pedagogies, participatory governance, develop learning materials and tools as well as actions that support the effective, critical and healthy use of ICT. This mainly included the exchange of good practices and additionally also innovation activities and promotion of new technologies (educational and gamification software, competence assessment software). These ICT tools have been weighed in balance with other types of formative assessment such as dialogic learning, portfolio and holistic assessment.. Fortunately, this goals has been reached quite well, despite, or should we say, thanks to the online activities we were forced to do.
We also managed to focus on the acquisition of skills and competences by addressing loss of motivation due to traditional teaching and assessment through effective and innovative learning, teaching and assessment, fostering critical thinking and adopt a holistic approach to language teaching and learning, as in problem-based learning, building on the diversity found in today’s increasingly multilingual classrooms.

Our project aimed at introducing a new pedagogy for 21st-century skills education where we start from the individuality and strengths of every pupil by exchanging good practices on innovative teaching methods and formative learning and assessment. We wanted to move from teacher control towards learner autonomy, from content mastery to learning mastery, from content delivery to making the learning process visible, from content consumption to pupils being able to use their competences in the real world. Although we are grateful for the opportunity to extend the project for 4 months, we have not been able to fully reach all our goals, due to the unforeseen cancellation of the mobilities of learners, the long-term teaching and pupil mobility.

Summarised, we managed to work on:

1. Self-directed learning (to develop 21st-century skills): students need to have ownership of their own learning process.
2. Innovative methods for self-directed learning, making learning visible and for developing 21st-century skills aiming for “deep learning”.
3. Formative assessment methods to assess the acquisition of 21st-century skills.

After 3 years of KA2 project work, we are proud to present our online toolbox on innovative learning, teaching and assessment (www.tracknteach.eu), and we will continue to develop it in future projects.

Project Website

http://www.futureskills21.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 170796,54 Eur

Project Coordinator

Miniemeninstituut & Country: BE

Project Partners

• European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education
• Timeout Schule Liechtenstein
• De Nieuwste School
• LYCEE HUBERT CLEMENT ESCH
• LYCEE SARDA GARRIGA
• Leppävaaran lukio
• Sandnessjøen videregående skole