The Solar System

Greece Joint staff training

This joint staff training event officially launched the project. The participating teachers, both teacher groups from the sending organizations and local participants, met to design the details of the Magna Charta of the project, in scientific/pedagogical terms as well as in organizational terms. The hosting school designed a workshop, as a part of the school's daily timetable, where participating teachers got involved in joint activities to learn, analyze and reflect on the scientific framework of the project. On the first day of the workshop, the beneficiary school project coordinator introduced the nature of the socio-cultural theory on which the project is built and challenged the participants to discuss issues concerning text selection and analysis, appropriate to design a CLIL class of a constructive nature, language choices, proper to get students involved in developing plurilinguistic/pluricultural skills, and pedagogical steps taken to develop a CLIL class within the specific socio-cultural and linguistic needs and skills of the students. Next, the language teacher of the hosting school, a member of the project's pedagogical team, organized a Mythology/Astronomy creative writing class for the teachers, during which the parameters of the theoretical framework were applied and developed, and teaching examples were designed and discussed. Finally, a Physics teacher presented the timeline from ancient physics to present-time physics and showed Eratosthenes's experiment, as a micro-teaching session which could be part of a hands-on CLIL class. This first session of the workshop was also attended by teachers invited from nearby schools, educational counselors and other members of the local educational community. After this session was over, the participating teachers reflected on the content and discussed a series of issues, concerning the pedagogical development of the project and the organizational details of it. On the second day of the workshop, the hosted teacher groups of the project got involved into micro-teaching activities with the students participating in the project. The classes included a two-hour session of Mythology/Astronomy creative writing teaching as part of the project's CLIL class and another two-hour session of Astronomy teaching, seen through a cross-curricular lens, where the project's scientific framework was extensively developed. Both teachers and students had the chance to get familiar with new tools of designing, teaching and attending a CLIL class, as well as with the core directives of designing and using relative teaching material. On the third day of the event the participating teachers visited places of archaeological/cultural interest, both as a part of the project's cultural profile, where Mythology keeps the main ground and these places are directly linked to mythological entities and stories dealt with in the project, and as a tribute to celebrating 2018 as the year of the European Cultural Heritage.

This activity being designed as a workshop meant that the teachers and students involved would have an immediate, interactive, creative and productive involvement within the project's framework and principles, since ours is a teaching project. On the completion of this activity, all the involved stakeholders a) gained a concrete and oriented view of both the theoretical and practical aspects of teaching CLIL, b) understood the general parameters of the underlying theory of the project, c) had the chance to realize what tools, methods and processes can be used to ultimately reach the potential of the project, d) were invited to become the multipliers of the newly gained knowledge back to their schools, thus training not only the other participating teachers, but also other teachers interested, e) gained valuable knowledge and experience from a different educational context and realized how these ones can be transferred to their educational reality, f) clarified issues concerning the development and implementation of the project g) learnt how to jointly work to organize a teaching project regardless of possible differences in the curriculum, pedagogical priorities or teaching practices. This workshop also managed to involve teachers and educators outside the beneficiary's school framework, thus spreading and multiplying the very essence of European Erasmus+ cooperation and the generation of original and bottom-top teaching material and methodologies.

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