“Mind Mapping and Multiple Intelligence for primary education” Erasmus Project

Project Title

“Mind Mapping and Multiple Intelligence for primary education”

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 Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

We can say that we, more or less, realised the majority of those plans described in our application through a mutual compromise, deep respect and exemplary cooperation among our 6 European partner schools.
We can also honestly admit that this was a very optimistic project plan which we thought we should realise with no particular problems.
Nevertheless, it turned out to be a mostly challenging project, especially the 2nd part of it – Multiple Intelligence (M.I.) – as well as the implementation of the Project Based Learning (P.B.L.) method in all project activities, so we had to replan them in order to keep the project attractive and simple.
We had initially planned 4 complex activities for project year 3 that they were supposed to be realised in a 9 months time but the topic was too complex and we had to use all 8 different intelligences. So, we realised in their place simpler activities such as : “Teaching addition to younger ages” and “Teaching Language to older ones”, or “Our Solar System”.
These M.I. activities needed a lot of preparation by many colleagues at school at the same time and we had to plan them with no special guidance like the ones in Mind Mapping (M.M.).
During the 2nd part we tried to invite experts on M.I. from different partner countries with not such a great success. We believed that we could find an expert on guiding us to realise M.I. activities at school, but we didn’t, as most of them teach a theoretical only basis of M.I. and not concrete everyday practical activities that our schools need.
At the same time implementing P.B.L. in all project activities turned out to be another challenge as for example Mind Mapping is mainly an individual procedure.
P.B.L. was better to be used in the 2nd part of the project and we had the chance to learn more on this method by our mentor Aglaia lab.
MM was accepted with great joy by both students and parents and is adopted and used nowadays in all partner schools as a very important tool. It worked well with all student groups plus with students with lower academics skills.
MI is a way of teaching and learning that we are going to use more and more the following years as we now have understood and acquired the “know how” of it and the culture of cooperation among colleagues in partner schools has been raised significantly during the last project year.
It worked very well with students with lower academics skills, immigrants and refugees in some schools which was our main goal.
We all think that our students’ self confidence has been raised by using M.M. and M.I. because even though they might be not as good in academics, now they can participate in our schools daily teaching and learning process equally, contributing with their own special skills, be it artistic, athletic, etc. This can only be good for their future inside our schools and later in society.
Most partner teachers and some parents have also adopted the MM tool for their work and the preparation of their classes.
During the 1st part of the project everything was realised as scheduled because we were lucky to have excellent guidance by our M.M. expert, the Paramikro lab in Greece.
Another challenge we encountered was the lack of dedicated funding by the EU for our parents’ mobilities that we initially and by mistake thought it was funded by E.U. (Accompanying Persons budget). As it was not, 3 partner schools (Swedish, Spanish and French) left the group and the project and we, the rest partners had to re-share their responsibilities, reschedule the mobilities and transfer money from our schools’ budget to new activities.
That meant that teachers in certain partner schools had to work more than it was planned and the coordinating school had to transfer almost 2/3 of its Project Management budget to the 2 activities that had originally been planned to be realised by the Spanish school.
Teaching became a more enjoyable procedure for the teaching staff and learning using MM and MI became more attractive for our students as it was initially described in the application. We know this both from our everyday contact with our students and from surveys in Google forms we created in order to evaluate this impact.
We opened our schools to the broader family of our local communities’ members, parents, external partners and we created a future network of potential partners with plans for innovative future/follow up projects.
All partner schools adopted the idea of the coordinating school to create in their schools a European Development Plan for their schools that is needed when applying for a KA1 or a KA2 Project.
Parents were actively involved in the project and they were a crucial part of it. One of the most successful side effects of this project was to meet new cultures and to be guided and hosted by locals abroad.
Less than the scheduled 94 of parents traveled abroad, tasted Europe and transmitted their positive experience to parents’ associations due to the funding problem we mentioned.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 205372,89 Eur

Project Coordinator

Exikosto proto dimotiko sholeio Thessalonikis & Country: EL

Project Partners

• Istituto Comprensivo “Grosseto1” Alberto Manzi
• Szkola Podstawowa im. Swietej Jadwigi Krolowej w Szarowie
• Agrupamento de Escolas Gomes Teixeira, Armamar
• ECOLE ELEMENTAIRE JEAN JAURES 1
• SEFKAT ILK OKULU
• Scoala Gimnaziala Mihai Eminescu
• Dagsbers skola