Preventing ESL in Secondary Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Preventing ESL in Secondary 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 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

This project was about ESL and basic skills. The EU want ESL to be down on 10% in 2020, and we are far from that goal. Lack of basic skills is the main reason for ESL. Without the basic skills students will meet defeats, which will cause absence and lead to ESL. We believe that what is going on in the classroom is, what motivates students. Therefore the four partners have developed methods of teaching, which will enhance basic skills and motivation and thus minimize ESL. We knew that the jeopardized students are in lack of basic skills especially in Math, National Language and Foreign Languages.
Our goal was to enhance these basic skills for these students, which should lead to better marks, higher motivation and thus to less ESL. Our goal was to minimize ESL with 50% and to improve the marks by one grade. In the involved schools we had worked with ESL mostly with administrative initiatives, and now it was time to take the initiatives into the classroom. To get more motivation we needed to find new methods of teaching. So we developed a project focused on the European key competences:• Communication in the mother tongue• Communication in foreign languages• Mathematical competence and basic competence in science and technology• Digital competence• Learning to learn• Social and civic competences• Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship• Cultural awareness and expression.
All 4 schools in the project are secondary schools
Helsingoer Gymnasium, Denmark (PIC: 933055029) has 700 students and 75 teachers. The students come from very different social classes from the the very rich families to the very poor families. Most of our students are ethnic Danes, but we have a growing number of students from other ethnic groups. This is about 10 % of the students.The focus points of the scool are it, innovation and globalization. We have partnerships with many schools abroad.
IES Botikazar/Botikazar BHI, Spain (PIC: 948945666) has about 700 students and 67 teachers. We offer a wide range of different programs, both academic and vocational. Botikazar BHI wants to support the implementation of the internationalization of student and staff exchange and the introduction of the European dimension in our curriculum. We are a multilingual school; we do not only use the two official languages in the region, Spanish and Basque, but English is taught very successfully as Content and Language Integrated Learning.
Many students come from that disadvantaged areas, specially in courses in which the main teaching language is Spanish. As the school is located in a bilingual area (Basque and Spanish), we have different programs and innovative practices about national languages teaching methods.
Olympiaskolan, Sweden (PIC 932775572) has general education departments in social science, languages, cultural history, natural science. The school also has programmes with vocational training.The school has students 705 students from lower middle class and middle class families with different origins – mainly from Sweden and 60 employees. We are and have been participants in several international projects.
IIS Vilfredo Federico Pareto (PIC 942084759) has 750 students and 60 teachers. From it has had an experimental curriculum with courses that have always been innovative and open to new didactic concepts. Nowadays our courses range from vocational education in the agriculture fields to technical courses focused on business administration, international law and tourism as well as the building sector to liceo courses with social science option. It has a lot of experience in cooperations and exchange programs with many European countries.
The “Pareto high school collects students from lower classes and immigrants (50%), 50% from lower middle classe and middle class families.
The main activities were three learning, teaching and training meetings. In the first one we met to develop new teaching methods in Mathematics. In the second one we met to develop new teaching methods in foreign languages and in the third one we developed new teaching methods in mother tongue languages. All based on sharing ideas of best practice. You can find more information about the itineraries on our homepage preventing-esl.eu. After each meeting the teachers involved in the project taught after the agreed methods for 2 months.
For all three projects our evaluation showed that the most important factor for motivation is the teacher’s ability to motivate by showing engagement, lesson structure with relevant tasks, repetition, a good and quiet working environment, variation, individual focus. All the teachers have realized how important their relation to the students is to motivate the students. The key words to success are: involving students, relationship, communication/individual feedback, long term purpose and structure. For details in each of them we recommend you to go to our homepage: preventing-esl.eu.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 52875 Eur

Project Coordinator

Helsingoer Gymnasium & Country: DK

Project Partners

• ISTITUTO ISTRUZIONE SUPERIORE STATALE VILFREDO FEDERICO PARETO
• IES Botikazar/ Botikazar BHI
• Olympiaskolan