We are in the second year of the „miracle” called Erasmus+ Project in a rural school… The Gimnazial School in Găneasa commune, Olt County. Thus, the year 2017 meant for the Găneasa Secondary School another year of hard work, but also a great success: obtaining the grant for the project submitted within the selection of the National Agency for Community Programs in the field of Education and Vocational Training, Erasmus+ Program, Key Action 1 – School education, Axis – Mobility of teaching staff for learning purposes.
Our project „Education-Window to a Better World” has received a grant of 27600 Euros, has a 2 (two) years period of development, 1 December 2017 – 30 November 2019 and provides mobility expenditures for 11 (eleven) teachers within 4 (four) mobility flows.
In this soul project we put all our hopes for the future. Born of the idea of not letting the school „die,” we decided to do more to keep our children in school. We identified our greatest need – inadequate teacher training on how to work with rural students from disadvantaged families (many, without income, disintegrated), students in placement or with special needs …., in order to increase attractiveness for school, to reduce the risk of abandonment and to increase learning outcomes through the development of skills and abilities. Thus, the drastic decrease in the number of pupils due to multiple causes: early school leaving, student migration, lack of motivation for pupils to learn, reduced school attractiveness, poor results at national exams, insufficient teacher training for addressing these issues, poor preparation for the use of new creative methods with the integration of modern technology, insufficient openness to the European dimension… becomes a consequence of the fact that we are not sufficiently prepared to reduce or stop this phenomenon.
The aim of the project is to increase the quality of the services provided by the institution by developing new teaching-learning skills and institutional development to at least 1/3 of the school staff.
The objectives identified by us are to increase the quality and attractiveness of the educational process by developing new personal and professional competences for teachers.
We are also pursuing the development of the European dimension that can lead to the development of management and quality through the internationalization process and we want to create a partnership with a European school, either on the eTwinning platform or by starting a strategic partnership with another school institution that has the same problems, from which we can take example of good practice, confronted with such problems and solved them. But what also hurts us is to reduce the phenomenon of early school leaving by reducing the number of absences and achieving better results at national exams, all of which will increase the prestige of the school and recognize its value in the coming years.
The opportunity to participate in Erasmus + mobility training courses, which are very well suited to meeting our needs and achieving the desired goals, is the right solution for delivering results in order to increase the quality of the services provided by our institution.
Because we are a small number of teachers in school, we divided the flows of mobility during the two years of implementation, namely 2 (two) flows in the summer of 2018 and the other 2 (two) in the summer of this year, 2019.
In the first mobility flow, which took place in Prague, the Czech Republic, 3 (three) teachers were formed in Early School Leaving + Using the E-Learning Platform. Non-formal activities, along with examples of innovative and collaborative teaching methods, along with attention-learning, emotional and social learning exercises and the use of Web 2.0 tools, were the main activities we attended.
The second mobility flow took place in Portugal, and the three (three) participating teachers were formed in the course „Make technology your friend!”, following the use of ICT in modern classroom classes.
It follows, as I said, the other two mobility flows that will end our project.
Thus, the fact that we are going to acquire new skills, to get acquainted with new teaching methods, innovative, creative, using modern technology and on-line tools that once acquired, we return to use them in the classroom and to disseminate to our colleagues, generate attractiveness and motivation amongst our pupils, our target audience. By gaining interest and motivation, increased attendance at courses and, implicitly, improvement of school results should result, which can then lead to better results at national exams. This could lead to our recognition as a school of values and would increase the community’s interest in school and our attractiveness to our school offer.