‘Project Based Learning’ in Action Erasmus Project

Project Title

‘Project Based Learning’ in Action

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development)

Project Summary

All 5 schools in our consortium face great challenges as we work to educate the pupils from our very diverse communities. Ensuring our staff constantly improve the quality of our teaching and that our pupils remain challenged by learning are shared concerns.

Both separately and together, our schools have decided to encourage our staff to develop the approach of ‘Project Based Learning’ as a way of helping improve the teaching we deliver.

This 2 year project will allow us to focus on this as a key part of our development and to exchange expertise around the pedagogy as we develop it and roll it out across our respective curriculums. We want to share our expertise to further the development of the teaching in all of our partner schools and to incentivise raising teaching quality and innovation. This can benefit the learning experience for our pupils, as well as improve our results.

Project Based Learning, the methodology we’ll explore together, is a teaching style where students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem or challenge. In the last year, it is a pedagogy that our coordinating school, John Donne School, has decided should be implemented across all year groups. While our school is rated as ‘Outstanding’ at Ofsted, we know it is important to work hard to ensure that we continue to always provide inspiring teaching.

In our challenging, inner city setting, we need new ways to maintain and improve our standards.

The other partners in our project similarly see the value in the PBL (Project Based Learning) method…and are either already using it in their schools in some way or want to share the process of developing it with us to benefit their own teachers and pupils.

Nearby Goose Green Primary (UK) has been identified as needing to innovate to improve.

Our other project partners are 1 school from France, 1 from Sweden and 1 from Spain.

We have developed our connections to each other in different ways but believe that our varied approaches and contexts will allow us to build a strong partnership for learning around PBL. (The French partners visited John Donne School in 2017 where we discovered common approaches to teaching. Our borough has had links with Järfälla, Sweden since 2011 and the John Donne International coordinator visited our Swedish partner school there in 2017…and we have had Etwinning and informal links with the Spanish coordinator from the Spanish Gran Canaria school since 2012.)

Our 2 year partnership project will develop around 2 Short Term Training Events each year (–4 gatherings in all over the life of the project.) One Event will take place in each country so that every partner has the chance to contribute to hosting the others. We expect a core group of learning leaders from every school (5 per school) to attend each meeting and develop work during the exchanges that they then share with their full teaching team on their return home for the benefit of their entire schools. Subject/ year leaders and a senior representative from each school will take part each time.

The final 2 Events will also have coinciding pupil PBL exchanges (between our French and Spanish schools).

This schedule will see a PBL project gathering approximately once every 6 months, to ensure that the focus on developing and rolling out the pedagogy in our schools is maintained, but also that there is space in between for the approach to be developed and to grow in each school. We will share training with each other at each Event and set each other tasks and challenges to motivate the development of the PBL approach across every subject we teach. Our methodology will include ‘team teaching’ each other, class observations, joint research, and the development together of PBL task to be undertaken in all partner schools and then evaluated together to measure relative impact and investigate the different approaches we expect each school will likely come up with.

We will document our work on Etwinning.

We will evaluate our work together at each meeting in an ongoing way and at the end of the project to measure the improvements we hope to make.

We will disseminate our work locally in each country as well as nationally and to our partners and interested parties internationally.

We will share the management roles required for the project to maintain momentum. The coordinating school will be responsible for achieving the goals of the project and keeping to schedule, with each other partner having responsibility for oversight of one ther aspect – e.g. dissemination, evaluation, Etwinning publishing, etc

In this way, we expect our project to achieve long lasting results in all of the schools taking part, for teaching to be energized and renewed and for the learning of all of our pupils to improve and move to the very forefront of everything we do.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 86039 Eur

Project Coordinator

John Donne Primary School & Country: UK

Project Partners

• Goose Green Primary School
• Herrestaskolan
• Ecole élémentaire Pau Casals
• CEIP Juan del Río Ayala