LIKE
LIfe sKills for improving primary school Environment
What is this about?
The LIKE - LIfe sKills for improving primary school Environment project intends to plan and develop specific experimental actions to prevent and reduce the school drop-out through the realisation of training, evaluation and school activities focused on life skills.
The European school systems are placed at the centre of social and economic growth, and issues such as early school leaving, completion of upper secondary and key skills should be the subject of legislation and implementation of plans of educational policies aimed at avoiding the social and economic marginalization of a significant proportion of young people.
Several studies in the last years have addressed the issue of "early school leavers" (ESL): among the causes of ESL investigated, it appeared that low self-esteem seems to "freeze" the ability to solve problems. There is a clear need for the education system to offer shared alternatives to prevent school drop-out ahead of time. The causes of ESL are mainly due to situations that encompass family and school, in relation to all social-pedagogical area that includes the ability to achieve certain educational standards identified as referential models.
The project intends to develop and disseminate an innovative pedagogic method, based on the centrality of pupils and of their emotional needs and requests, aiming to prevent and/or to face the early school leaving phenomenon. The aim is to develop a unique pattern flexible enough to be adapted to the specific contexts and conditions of the different regions and individual situations.
What is LIKE impact?
For "early school leaving" we mean the training processes’ anomaly that is determined by the people who drop out of school, even because of the education system's insufficient capacity to respond adequately to the needs of people in training.
The dispersion combines a set of phenomena such as: irregularities in attendance, constant delays, missed admissions to subsequent years, repetitions and interruptions that may result in the school drop-out, involving large sections of the population and leading to a serious lack of key competencies to participate in the community.
The drop-out is a multi-dimensional problem, including as relevant actors the individual, the individual in the group, the world of work and the institutions.
More specifically, the causes of early school leaving may, therefore, be identified in socio-cultural factors: the low level of education, especially when illiteracy involves the family or there are poor expectations with regard to education and academic success; the socio-economic situation, when the economic and professional position of parents influence children’s expectations about their school career; teaching methods and approaches, which sometimes don’t fit with a communicative and relational new context.
This means that LIKE project must take into account not only the students but also the teachers, the families and the institutions.
Methodologies that will be used to achieve main aim of the project
The project expects that the pupils fill their existential, communicative, relational and training needs; develop the motivation to study; know their own learning style and begin to exercise it with mastery; discover the strategic importance of understanding and the conditions under which it occurs. This is possible through a process of meaningful learning and training, in order to identify, build, hold, correlate concepts and meanings, to understand the importance of collaboration and teamwork and to be able to perform their cognitive and socio-emotional growth.
Operators and teachers must improve their ability to "read" the starting positions of students in terms of identifying cultural levels, modes of communication and relational learning styles of each.
In particular, the following factors will be recognized:
• the self-regulation in relation to the labour process;
• the sense of disorientation and the difficulty in own resources’ management;
• the difficulties of concentration and organization of activities;
• the anxiety and difficulty to control the emotional reactions;
• the willpower and perseverance in the commitment;
• the lack of perseverance in completing tasks;
• the perception of skills and sense of responsibility;
• the ability or inability to control the emotional interference.
In order to acquire these competencies, they will:
• identify teaching strategies and teaching approaches appropriate to the specific tasks required by the project: the year of tutoring and coordination of group dynamics; "clinical conversation" (Piaget); cooperative lesson (cooperative learning);
• managing and "bend" disciplines and the curriculum according to the specific training needs of those so-called "at risk";
• orient and address the variables that make up the "learning situation" of the school system, evaluation of processes and outcomes;
• produce documentation about the abovementioned activities.
Phases of the project
PHASE I (pedagogical kit and teachers training) - Programming of a training path and a pedagogical kit with schools.
A first approach involves the identification of the partner schools (primary cycles) to share the project and give life to programmatic arrangements for the implementation of common actions. In the identified schools, classes, where to make the testing kit and control classes, will be sampled. In these schools, teachers for the joint planning of the pedagogical kit will be involved. Considering the schools are located in different national contexts, a common work will be organized sharing methods and the "remote content construction" (Cloud teaching methodology) - A2
PHASE II (School experimentation) – Testing kit in experimental classes - A3
PHASE III (Kit efficacy) – Measuring the pupil’s life skills degree through teachers and families - A4
How it works?
The project results will remain available on the website of the Project website and website applicant. The applicant will guarantee to renew the web-hosting for two years after project ending and to embed it in its own official website.
In order to ensure that the results will remain available even after the end of the project, it is important partners commitment in deploy an intense involvement and awareness raising campaign at the national level, in order to build a trusted community which will be the ones eager to disseminate the project results after the project ends. Moreover, thanks to the partnership complementary and wide networks, the key stakeholders will be made aware on the results and on the importance that they have to use those results even in different contexts and within different target groups. In order to make this possible, the partners during the project would have created a different community of practices that have the intent of valorising those results.
The project has a strong component of capacity building of the target groups that will be the basis of the sustainability of the project, together with the involvement of the schools and key stakeholders, private and public ones.
The methodologies applied and the development of important tools/outputs together with the schools will for sure favour the “ownership” of action outcomes and the dissemination at other schools.
Expected results of the project
• the transfer of methodologies and effective tools to bring out recommendations useful to identify and combat the phenomenon of school drop-out and obtain target required by the target communities in the partnership countries;
• the experimentation and the tune-up of guidance services at all levels of education, and particularly in relation to the first cycle of education;
• the experimentation of training curricula specifically addressed to school teachers;
• contribution to the redefinition of school curricula with regard to life skills;
• the development of models of intervention on the phenomenon of early school leaving to be replicated and exploited, focusing on inclusion;
• testing of non-formal education methodologies in order to combat school drop-outs;
• development of a system for monitoring and evaluation of the achieved results;
• in the long term, an elevated rate of educational success (reduction of school drop-outs), and an increased levels of youth participation in educational and vocational curricula with a consequent reduction of the competences mismatches between educational systems and labor market.
More about the organization
Asociacíon Cultural Euroaccion Murcia
Euroaccion is an active member of UNIQUE Network (http://www.unique-network.org/ ) and HREYN (www.hreyn.org).
Our vision is the personal change for social change.
Our mission is to inspire and stimulate the human potential through experiential learning, volunteering and social inclusion projects.
Email: info@euroaccion.com
Website: http://www.euroaccion.com/
Location: Murcia, Spain
Phone: (+34) 968375754
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/euroaccion/
Twitter: @euroaccion