Here you can find the Evaluation Report.
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The project “Researching for the Future “ was carried out from September 2017 to June 2019, the schools involved were four ( from Italy, Spain, Germany and Greece) where students, teachers and staff participated to the researches and to the international mobilities, while parents , local research centres and officers took part to events of the national meetings.
The purpose of the whole project was bettering the quality of teaching in our schools, supporting the professional development of teachers, helping them to develop a scientific method of approaching topics of several fields from science to ecology and social studies. First the teachers learnt how to use the research method during the first meeting in Spain. Then during the preparation phases to each international meeting the students made studies, surveys and researches, collected data and elaborated them to final results. Some posters were printed and the first results were shown at the second and third meetings, when, also , some workshops were taken place. The workshop moreover gave the start to the international researches to which the students took art, like the one about the impact of mobiles on sleeping habits and the other about the different life style between the 1980s and today.
The majority of topics was chosen by the students during the first international meeting in Spain. They had the aim of improving the basic learners’ competences in STEM and increasing their awareness of Learning to learn in order to be able to face the future .
The Italian school developed the following national projects: Cleaning water by pants; Why People Like Carnival, the Food of the Future, Bioplastic, Aromatic Plants and Impact on Health, Art in Syracuse, Blue Crystal.
Then it took part to the following International researches: You are What you Eat, How Life was 25 Years Ago, A Song for Europe.
The international meetings were all were prepared . The teachers communicated quite often to exchange ideas . They usually kept in touch by mails . Also skype and whatsapp were useful to share information while carrying on the project. On the whole each partner school was in charge of an aspect of the project and everyone made all the best to accomplish its task. The collaboration between the schools was excellent especially during the international meetings which were held in spirit of full cooperation and friendship.
During the LTM also the PTM took place. Teachers had many meeting hours in order to check how the wok proceeded, if there were problems to sort out and to define the next steps to take.
The results of all the researches were exhibited in the final meeting in Creete during which a context was held ,where the students voted the best researches choosing among the best explained, the most scientifically relevant and the ones with a better impact on the future behavior. Among our outputs we have to consider the final song, the lyric of which was made up by the schools each of which wrote a stanza in its own language.
The schools involved in the project invited primary school students to take part to some event like workshops or special days in order to spread the method of researching and cooperation.
During the meetings the students visited important research centres or universities to be informed on recent studies and methodologies. In Madrid The Medical centre was visited , in Germany we went to the biggest Astronomic telescope, in Italy we visited the centres of Mediterranean plants and in Creete we visited a centre of digital researches at the University.
Students could be in touch with different fields of research and meet interesting people involved in it.
The Erasmus project was visible in each school website, in the etwinning platform and in the website of the exchange that were updated during the different phases of the project.
The impact of the project was important. First of all about 20 students per school could travel to another country. This is relevant for schools like the ones in Sicily or in Creete because they are far away from big towns and students do not have normally many occasions of travelling, visiting important towns and speaking foreign languages. During the project the students improved digital competence as well as social and communicative abilities.
Also the teachers had an important occasion of learning a new approach to their teaching subject, improved their teaching method and could live an international experience where they shared their teaching initiatives with other teachers, inhancing their global competences.
The local communities were also involved because parents took part to some events , the families hosted the students coming from other countries and the local authorities welcomed all the delegations during their staying so that the young people could see how the policies for the young generations are carried out in the different countries.
After each phase of the project the Greek school, that was in charge of that, monitored the grade of cooperation between partners, the level of digital and linguistic abilities of each participants and evaluated the results of each meeting. The school from Italy asked the participants to write an evaluation of their experience and the most complete reports have been uploaded on the project website.