D.2

Please describe the motivation for this project and why this project is needed 9000 characters
 * D 2. RATIONALE **

Our Comenius project group consists of six schools: German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. The composition of our group is not accidental. Four out of six schools of the present Comenius group have collaborated in various configurations on Comenius-School Partnerships projects since 2007. It means that two schools are new to the Comenius project and need our assistance. Four coordinators took part in Teachers Training courses. Friendship that had started there resulted in the involvement of schools in distant parts of Europe into collaboration on Partnerships projects. http://virtualeden.wikispaces.com/, []. The results of our collaboration were surprisingly good. However, the Comenius programme had a great impact on teachers. Most of them were involved in the projects on an international level for the first time. Earlier some colleagues felt inferior or burnt-out, while others were too tired to think of an international collaboration. Participation in the Comenius projects enabled them to recognise their own achievements and inspired them to more effective work . On the basis of our previous experience we decided to initiate a new project: PEDAGOGICAL INNOVATIONS. In contrast to the earlier ones, we are going to **focus on teachers who deal with children combating problems at school and barriers to learning.** Discussions made during mobilities have led us to a decision to focus predominantly on teachers’ work. Although teachers, in general, make great progress with the students, they are not good at making it visible, they rarely present the results they achieve and, above all, their pedagogical methods to each other, the parents and their local school politicians. The time came to encourage our colleagues to face their personal development to revise their pedagogical approaches, to develop their ICT competences, and to improve foreign languages skills. If these objectives are achieved within a local school only, teachers may have the impression that they do not make as much progress in the educational field as their students do. The collaboration on the international level should enhance teachers’ pride in being European teachers. The project will prepare them to be much more flexible when it comes to the workplace. Co-operation with teachers from different countries should enrich their intercultural competence and cross-cultural dialogue. The project will help us combat stereotypes and prejudices. On the other hand, it will make it possible to promote our nationwide programmes in partners’ countries. During the project meetings, guest schools will introduce themselves on A DAY TOGETHER IN EUROPE. In the project PEDAGOGICAL INNOVATIONS, we would like to concentrate on one aspect of teachers’ tasks – preventing school failure among students //with disadvantaged backgrounds//. To engage all staff in the Comenius activities, the PEDAGOGICAL INNOVATIONS project will be comprised of two parallel programmes: BETTER LANGUAGE - BETTER LEARNING  and HIDDEN TALENTS. The former is focusing on preventing children’s school failures through improving their reading skills and requires a more specialized approach. The latter is focusing on children’s personal development through discovering their strong points and requires a more holistic approach. As coordinators of Comenius projects we are accustomed to using ICT to communicate within and between schools. Therefore we were able to analyse the problem we would like to consider. During teachers’ meetings we clarified the fields of our activities, their objectives, applied teaching strategies, expected effects/results, as well as evaluation tools. Each school team presented educational needs: the least developed skills as identified through observation or external assessments such as PISA and PIRLS tests and our nationwide external exams. Based on this, the decision was jointly made to concentrate on improving students’ reading competency. To carry out the BETTER LANGUAGE…  programme, we intend to determine target groups on a few levels: 8-year-olds 10-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 15-year-olds. Our Project Group will set up a detailed plan: Part 1 – organizational, Part 2 – three stages of working with students and international exchange of teaching materials; each of the stages completed with an evaluation. Part 3 – collaboration on publishing our final product – a book completed with a DVD. During Part 1 we will organize target groups and examine and assess students’ reading competence. Various tests will be used concerning, for example, home/parent survey: question about the students’ early reading experiences, child-parent literacy interactions, gender aspects, demographic and socio-economic indicators. During Part 2 the defined time, divided into three stages, teachers will work with students. Meantime, using ICT, teachers will exchange the best teaching strategies and examine them in their schools. An evaluation programme will be introduced to observe students’ progress. During Part 3 the best teaching strategies should become evident after the final test. The results will be summarised and the book will be published before the end of the PEDAGOGICAL INNOVATIONS project to get feedback from teachers all over the world. Focusing on improving reading competency exclusively would limit the number of teachers involved in the project so the teachers' task will be not only to prevent possible students’ failure but also to discover HIDDEN TALENTS among them. Discovering success in non-academic areas, and being able to show these skills and talents to an international audience, may help young people to break through their barriers or even start their own professional career. As different parts of a brain have tasks in reading, the whole brain should be used. Thus, we will do many activities in different lessons such as Art (periodical patterns, rhyme of pictures), Music (sounds, inner hearing, rhythm of words), Physical Education (concentration, coordination of movements) that make it a cross curricular project. Ultimately, the impact on pupils will be the greatest legacy of the project. To carry out the project teachers will work according to their school curricula and simultaneously on the international level. Solutions and strategies can be implemented by each school separately. However, the Comenius project will give us a unique opportunity to work jointly through the exchange of materials, sharing our expertise, comparing the results and publishing the best materials. Participation of new partner schools will broaden our intercultural effectiveness. English is our language of communication. We could observe that, encouraged by English teachers at their schools, many members of the staff decided to start English courses to communicate during mobilities. They achieved B1 level in the CEFR standards and would like to continue to improve. In this project the German language can be used as the second language of communication because it is the second/third language of some students/teachers (Italy, Poland, Hungary, Sweden) so the group will be more linguistically diverse. Our mother tongues, as less used languages, will be presented in our final product and will be the aim of one of our many activities. So far we have had an opportunity only to observe other teachers’ lessons during mobilities. This time we would like to experience teaching to children in another country and getting their feedback. The host schools will provide us with the organizational aspect of their educational system from preschool to university. In this way we are going to overcome our anxieties and become truly European teachers, regardless of which country we happen to work in. In the future we will be experienced enough to carry out more challenging European projects. An integral part of our project is a constant development of teachers’ ICT competencies. Our group has launched a Wiki to make everyone fully involved and speed up our collaboration in setting up the project http://hiddentalents.wikispaces.com/. We are going to improve our ability to present and visualize students’ performance and progress with the help of modern tools by using Excel (diagrams, results), web surveys (compare methods, exchange ideas), PowerPoint (present methods and results) and publish it on the wiki. To keep the results of our work updated we would like to create a website which will be a starting point for further collaboration. During the final mobility, the host school intends to organize an international conference (in cooperation with their educational authority) to present the results of our project PEDAGOGICAL INNOVATIONS. // All these factors will contribute to the positive development of lifelong learning. If European teachers continue improving their knowledge through all their professional lives, their students will model such an approach. // 8966drf