Smart Methods and Ideas for Learning in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Smart Methods and Ideas for Learning in Europe

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

The SMILE (Smart Methods and Ideas for Learning in Europe) project originated from an actual need in the five partnerschools. We all tackled similar problems and we all tried to deal with those issues in our own way. Combining our strengths should lead to better results and faster growth. For this reason our schools were engaged in this endeavour. These major topics we decided to work on was:

*) Early School dropout: all partners felt that the school dropout rate in their country/region/school was too high. The goal was to lower this rate at our schools by sharing our best practices and develop/work with ELS preventing methods.

*) Individualised learning: Our schools mission is to get the best out of every pupil. We thought a more individualised approach on learning could help us reaching this mission. We set out to develop individualised learning tracks and materials. We planned to work with pupils within these tracks and measure their results. We also set as a goal to share all experiences and materials at the end of the project.

*) Internationalisation: all our schools were convinced that we need to teach our pupils and train our staff in an international context. This will prepare the pupils for a future in a more and more globalising world and it’ll allow our staff to learn and experience best practices from around the world which we expect will enhance the quality of their work.

To make all this happen we first did an investigation into several subjects related to these topics in order to get a clear overview of where we started from (baseline measurement). This helped to understand differences between our schools and why maybe certain solutions won’t work or just aren’t allowed.
As soon as we had these results we could start working on the topics. We decided to have three project meetings (spread over 3 years) During these meetings we demonstrated best practices to each other, discussed them, learned from them and work out new plans to implement them in our schools.

Every six months these topic teams had formal evaluation meetings online. In the “individualised learning” topic we also organised long-term learning mobilities for pupils. These are ideal situations where we could create individualised learning tracks.

By the end of the project we have a lot of materials and results which are publically shared as Open Educational Resources and in the Smile project website (as a collection of methods for tackling Early School Leaving and supporting Individual learning, named Best practice book and dropout prevention protocol in the application form).

In our view this project was not an end product but only the beginning of a process where we want to make significant changes in our schools to improve on the topics at hand. Our schools are engaged to keep on working on these topics together, even after the project has ended, as an etwinning project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 96020,84 Eur

Project Coordinator

HTBLA Perg & Country: AT

Project Partners

• Sjöängsskolan
• IES SELGAS
• Talentenschool Turnhout campus Zenit
• St. Dominic’s Secondary School, Ballyfermot, Dublin 10