Transformation of upper secondary schools Erasmus Project

Project Title

Transformation of upper secondary schools

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: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

TUSS – Transforming Upper Secondary School Education aims at spearheading innovative approaches to teaching and learning on upper secondary level. In an ever more interconnected world, we share more than divides us and we all face the same challenges when it comes to how to adequately prepare our students for tomorrow.

By exploring, testing and implementing new and progressive formats of teaching and learning on upper secondary level and exchanging experiences, our four well-established progressive schools Klex (Graz/Austria), Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum (Berlin/Germany), Ørestad Gymnasium (Kopenhagen/Denmark) want our students to develop into responsible, self-confident, emotionally intelligent, interculturally sensitive and active members of their nations and European society. We want to foster creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, imagination and inventiveness in students in order to prepare them for the flexibility and dynamism required in the future.

The participants are teachers from the four schools who are deeply involved with the development of each of the schools’ upper secondary levels and students involved in or interested in school developemnt processes. These schools together with two associated school (Gymnasium Unterstrass in Zurich/Switzerland and Jenaplanschule in Jena/Germany) have already been cooperating for a while (6 months to 2 years depending on the partners) in order to meet the challenge of sustainable upper secondary education with innovative teaching formats.

We are interested in exploring our options within the existing administrative structures. The drive of us teachers and students to constantly question and challenge the existing structures and formats in order to achieve the best possible education for the current and future generations of students fill our network with life and us with energy.

A lot of enthusiasm is often to be found in elementary and lower secondary education but less in upper secondary where the focus often heavily lies on managing the finals. But this is where it is most important to develop new teaching and learning formats in order to meet the challenges of our societies and labor markets in the 21st century. Moreover, the current trends in politics all across Europe make it even more important especially for young people to cooperate on this level and find in their Europeans peers a powerful and inspiring source for transformation on a local level.

Our schools will send four students each to one of the two partner institutions in order to immerse themselves on a more long-term basis into the other school, life and culture and to bring back valuable ideas to their own countries, the focus of observation always on the strengths of this particular school. They will get an inside view of a European school that is progressive in a different field than his/her own, namely in the field of civic participation and focus on fostering individual strengths and talents of students (Berlin), in the field of media/IT and responsible citizenship (Kopenhagen), in the field of social learning and self-responsibillity of students (Graz). These students and, of course, also the teachers travelling to the partner schools will act as ambassadors and explorers who have the capacity to bring about change.

We will meet and exchange ideas in video conferences every two months and hold an annual meeting with two teachers and two students from every school. During these meetings we intend to not only exchange ideas about new learning formats but we also to find ways to reach a larger audience for our ideas, for example by creating a universally accessible platform of teaching ideas and projects worth spreading.

Our goal is to create a growing network of like-minded schools for pan-European exchange of “best practice” formats and to make all our findings accessible for the broader public via a website, organising local networking events, e.g. in Graz in 2018 and Copenhagen in 2020 during our planned conferences so that we inspire other upper secondary schools by our European network and our diverse approaches for a modern 21st century upper secondary school.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 37430,39 Eur

Project Coordinator

BG/BRG/NMS Klusemannstraße & Country: AT

Project Partners

• Oerestad Gymnasium
• Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum