Professional Development of Teachers in Digital Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Professional Development of Teachers in Digital 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 : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Quality Assurance

Project Summary

The project combines the efforts of 3 teachers’ unions in 3 countries in the heart of the Balkan Region (Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia). The whole concept behind the project is to establish a strong regional partnership with strong impact, which would contribute to ensuring quality school education on regional level matching current COVID-19 challenges. The current project rationale emerged from a scientific research on the models of distant learning in electronic environment, which has been conducted by Dr. Yanka Takeva, Prof. Tzokov and Prof. Lefterova. As declared in the Erasmus+ COVID-19 call and backed up by our observations as institutions that directly interact and support teachers on daily basis, the main challenge for different forms of distant/digital education to take place in our systems is the level of preparedness of teachers to operate in online learning environment. For many years teachers in our countries have had access to training opportunities in digital skills, which they have regularly attended. International companies like Google and Microsoft has also been very active in promoting open source opportunities for utilizing their products for online classroom activities. Every country has adopted strategic documents highlighting the importance of ICT skills for all teachers.
The COVID-19 situation challenged all listed measures and activities. Though majority of teachers managed to provide emergent online education with the outbreak of COVID-19, the quality of this provision was questioned not only by society (mainly parents), but also by the assessment of learning outcomes of students in the end of 2019/2020 school year.

With current project we would like to support teachers in our countries in developing solid digital skills and be effective in their new role of pedagogues changing between different learning environments (offline, online and blended). We will achieve this through developing, piloting and embedding of a comprehensive methodology for professional development of teachers in digital education, including a clear framework of evaluation criteria for delivery of online education. 12 teachers will be trained as teachers methodologists and apply it with 60 teachers.
ProTeach project is planned for 16 months. We realise that the challenges we would like to address require expedient efforts. That’s why we have decided to plan activities for a shorter duration, but with more intensive workload, so to be able to provide quality solution as quick as possible. At the same time the project duration reflects our good practice requiring enough time for design work, piloting of outputs, strong dissemination and sustainability measures.

At application stage, we expect the following impact emerging from achieving the main tangible and intangible results as highlighted above.
– Teachers methodologists – the immediate effect on them will be acquisition of new professional competences in the field of supporting professional development of their peers in the field of online/digital education. Other effects: increased self-esteem; motivation for development; improved horizontal skills like active listening, powerful questioning, feedback provision, evaluation of achievements. Furthermore, expanded understanding of the quality standards in the field of online teaching. Conducting pilot coaching sessions will solidify their mentoring – coaching – supervision competences and further enhance their motivation to develop as methodologists.
– Teachers, who will experience the new professional development model to be applied through delivery of the methodology. Our initial expectation is that the interaction with teachers methodologists will boost their professional performance in online environment. Seeing improved performance, they will be further motivated to invest in their ongoing professional development and expand their portfolio of instruments and knowledge applied in the daily work. They will develop their flexibility, which allow from smooth transition across different learning environments (online, offline, blended). In long term perspective, seeing the benefits of this experience, they might develop interest to become methodologists, as well.
– Students. Our expectations are that as a result of improved quality of online education provision, the positive effects for these young persons will be: increased motivation for development, measured by increased attendance and engagement rates; increased learning achievements, measured by their results in completion of evaluation assignments.

As highlighted in our rationale, we undertake this project to provide a new direction for development of our national education systems. Being one of the main drivers of education reforms in our countries, we believe that the evidence from our work will contribute directly to reshaping the systems for professional development to teachers in our countries and beyond.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 162810 Eur

Project Coordinator

Bulgarian teacher’s union & Country: BG

Project Partners

• Teachers Union of Serbia
• FSLI