School development through staff training
Project number: 2017-1-SE01-KA101-034227 Applicant: Introduktionsprogrammen Borlange Kommun
Project Summary
Our school has over the past few years seen an increased amount of students with immigrant background and/or learning disabilities. This has forced us to develop new teaching methods and find new ways to reach our students as they are often traumatized or at the risk of early school-leaving. We are in need of new methods and developing our old methods in order to meet the needs of our students to help them have success in their studies. Many of our students have a history of failing in school due to their learning abilities and some have very little experience from school as they have lived in refugee camps for years before arriving in our country. The objectives of this project is to help our staff develop new methods for teaching our students and to develop a more inclusive environment for all students, regardless of their background. We will send staff members from various fields of study to participate in the training courses and also non teaching staff that work closely with our teachers and students (counselling staff, student aids and teacher assistants). The staff have been chosen so that we have as many different fields of studies represented as possible. By doing so we hope that the new knowledge aquired will be implemented throughout our whole school. In total we have 23 different mobilities planned for this project and they are divided into 6 different training courses where between 1 and 8 staff members will participate in the different training events. When there are more than 2 staff members travelling they will travel in groups at different times so that we can get as much out of the trainings as possible. It is always very rewarding to meet colleagues from other countries and if we spread out over more time we will be able to meet and get to know more colleagues from other schools and perhaps be able to form bonds that we could use in the future for other projects. Our experience from previous projects within Erasmus+ is that, aside from all the knowledge and competence you aquire from the training course, there are also a lot of positive outcomes regarding meeting staff from all over Europe who work in schools. It provides us with a unique opportunity to get to know what the schoolsystems are like in other European countries as well as sharing good practices with other teachers and school staff. We are expecting a deeper knowledge among our staff regarding how we can develop our teaching methods and our classrooms so that we better meet the needs of our students. This, in turn, will provide our students with the tools to help them succeed in their studies and be able to have success regardless of their learning disabilities or their immigrant background. We are expecting to increase our staff members' competence regarding many different fields of study as well as meeting students with special needs and students that are traumatized and need to be integrated after migrating to our country from countries of war around the world. As each training event has taken place each group of participants will share their experiences with the rest of our staff at meetings where they will be able to tell everyone about the course and what they have learned. We will also discuss how to implement the new knowledge into our work and what we need to do to develop out methods to better meet the needs of our students.
We will also have seminars and workshops where we use our new knowledge to show the rest of the staff, more hands-on, what can be done in the clasroom regarding for example ICT and using different learning platforms or apps. The workshops will provide us with an opportunity to use/practise what we have learned from the courses. Our vice principal will also be able to share her experiences with other principals as she has her regular meetings with her colleagues. Our project manager will also be able to share our experiences from the project with other project managers around the country as she participates in meetings regarding international coorperation organized by our national agency.
We continously evaluate our school in order to see what needs to be developed and what has been developed in the past. A few times a year all staff members sit down to evaluate many different aspects of the school, both regarding teaching methods as well as other things such as how to organize our students or our classrooms. These evaluations are a great way to also see how our participaiton in the project has lead to the development of our school. It will be obvious after a few years whether or not we have managed to help our students succeed more in their studies. It will be measurable in their grades and in the level of their studies.
