As teachers and educators at Sports Program Highschool, we are permanently interested not only in developing competences in our students, but also keeping record of their social and emotional development, maintaining resilience and promoting their well being.
In this respect, there are plenty of local, national and international projects our school is involved in. I would like to mention one Erasmus project coordinated by Germany and which took place between the 13th and 15th of December 2021.
A group of ten teachers including me from Sports Program Highschool- Bistrița, together with our school headmaster virtually participated on the Zoom platform, to a course-actually, an in-training multi-national activity entitled ”Involving Youth – (Psychosocial and educational) Challenges for children and adolescents during the Coronavirus pandemic”, besides the other countries involved in the project, namely Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Germany, the coordinating country through the Sports-Youth organisation from Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany.
The goal of this training course was to promote the international exchange with specialists in the children and youth work.Moreover, the invited specialists were confronted with the actual situation from the educational system both as for children and teenagers coming from the European countries participating in the project. Furthermore,specialists should be aware of the actual research and findings regarding the impact of the Coronavirus pandemics upon the educational practices, they should be encouraged and supported to analyse, interpret them and come up with solutions.
The activities within the virtual camp took place on three different dates as follows:
- First day- 13th of December 2021 (16.00-18.00) – the kick-off meeting, getting to know each other and thematic introduction, wishes and expectations.
- Second day- 14th of December 2021 (10.00-16.00) – Bar Camp and the Round Table sessions split in two rounds of 60 minutes each, participants having the opportunity to talk to experts about psychosocial and educational challenges and opportunities that occurred throughout the coronavirus pandemic as well as discussing and exchanging best practice examples. Afterwards the participants exchanged these topics together and discussed about their experiences and their everyday life challenges. In this respect, various online applications were used such as mural.co, menti.com.
- Third day-15th of December 2021 (16.00-18.30) – Round-up, the aim of this meeting was to creatively document and secure the results of the conference. Each participant was supposed to “go home” after the conference with practical suggestions.
At present, we look forward to physical meetings within our K2 Erasmus + projects in order to continue maintaining the concept of lifelong education, as a motivational and resourceful area so as to make the didactic activity more efficient.
As teachers and people trainers, we are constantly looking for interactive, modern activities which can offer our students that well-being we all need especially now when times are problematic and people`s lives are at stake.Nowadays, when the mask has made us feel the world around us less and less, we have been lucky to be part of such a useful and informative virtual training camp where we could bring back all our life senses, pay more attention to what we see, what we hear, touch or smell, but above all to what we feel.This way we could realize that we are an endless resource of knowledge, creativity, will power, moral strength and much more, the capacity to adapt to people, life and contexts.
As acquired competences within this training course, I would mention the development of social and emotional ones, the reinforcement of resilience, then the capacity of self-reflection,the efficient management of time, information and at last but not least the development of self-learning ability.
In the near future, we expect to go back to our normal lives,physically interact and take advantage of the opportunities Erasmus + projects will definitely offer us.