Skilling me softly. Soft skills for an integral education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Skilling me softly. Soft skills for an integral 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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social dialogue; Gender equality / equal opportunities; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation

Project Summary

The term Soft Skills (SS) refers to those abilities, competencies or personal traits that show how a person relates to others. Improving our students’ SS will provide them with new tools to be more self-confident and to face future challenges. This project has been undertaken by a group of 4 schools from 4 European countries: Spain (coordinator), Greece, Norway, and Poland. They share different experiences in the various fields of teaching and learning SS, and also a will to develop these skills. This association of schools is the result of a careful process: the coordinator published a proposal on the eTwinning forum that was answered by a lot of schools. 3 of these schools were selected by applying certain criteria to make sure the final group would be cohesive, efficient and well-balanced. Their experience in European projects have been taken into account.
SS have been valued in different fields, such as employability, education and globalization. The world of business was the first to acknowledge these skills, but later their importance to relations among people, especially in the globalized world was underlined. This is why we want our students to learn SS in an international context.
Not only do we wish our students to be more skillful using a series of SS that we have selected for our project, we also want our schools to improve and to build structures that allow students to develop further after the end of the project. So, the beneficiaries of the project are students, schools, teachers, families, stakeholders and the areas where our students will implement their new skills. What’s more, there will be students with special needs, who thanks to the project, will reach their full potential and will have the opportunity to improve their quality of life.
We established 4 scopes of action, one per semester, to work on these SS: self-management, empathy, communication and empowerment.
We’ll reach these objectives through a certain number of activities, as well as particular modes of management and assessment. Nearly all activities have a 1st phase in each school -coordinated on eTwinning- and a 2nd one, internationalized, to be done in the 4 short-term student exchanges, one in each school at the end of each term. We want the maximum number of students to benefit from these international contexts. In each exchange, there’ll be activities that will be the culmination and summary of those done in the previous months in each school. There’ll also be time to get to know the place (city, region…) and a time for teachers to track and manage the project.
At the beginning of the project, we’ll do a short-term joint staff training event devoted to peer learning on SS. The combination of the experience of these schools with these topics and their desire to improve leads us to conclude that only by sharing our knowledge and participating in common training can we truly be part of in the project and understand what and how we want to teach our students.
We have enough elements to ensure sound functioning of the project. The coordinator school has successfully organised other European projects, and the other schools have repeatedly shown their proactivity and skills for team-work when working on the project. Tracking the project will be done in thematic work groups integrated by teachers from all schools. Furthermore, assertivity, a good working environment, capacity for constructive debate and efficiency displayed when preparing the project all allow us to believe that these factors will combine to establish our prevailing mode of operation. However, a certain number of operating rules were set up to support this good work.
Assessment t correct any issues will be done at different times on an ongoing basis, but especially at the end of each semester and at the end of the project. A survey to assess the state of SS among the students will be passed out at the beginning and at the end of the project to assess their evolution. The short-term students’ exchanges will have their own assessment. Also, all students of our schools, families, teachers and stakeholders will undergo an assessment process.
However, some objectives won’t be assessed within the project deadline. We expect the lasting effects of the project to be visible for many years thanks to the consistency which its structures can bring about. In the succeeding years we’ll evaluate the effects that we hope will have endured over time.
We’ll disseminate the project by different means. ETwinning and twinspace will be the main platforms for communication and collection of all the material and tasks that we’ll do. We’ll create a project webpage. Diffusion will also be done through local press, social networks, and the normal channels used by education professionals (symposia, papers, meetings…) in each country.

Project Website

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/93277/home

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 131795 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUT D’AURO & Country: ES

Project Partners

• 6 Gymnasio Kavalas
• Szkola Podstawowa nr 2 im Adama Mickiewicza
• Austbø skole