Students with and without special needs of 4 different countries show eachother in what they are an expert by using 4 themes: computer, gardening, art and cooking.
The project ‘Experts academy’ has a student oriented as well as a school oriented intention. With the students we started from the strengths of students with special needs. By working with different themes we showed each other what we are good in. Each partner country has chosen a theme in which the school has a lot of expertise.
For the work with the students we always had the same structure. One of the partners prepared a task for the others according to the theme in which he is an expert. The students took pictures from the result as well as the work process. They sent the images with instructions to the other partners and they had to try to do the same exercise and achieve a good result. We have put together the results of the partners in different ways. In this way we all became an expert in the themes of the others.
In the block of each team we met in the ‘expert-country’. We also took some of our students to the meetings. During the meetings the students worked together and tried to reach a common goal by working on a common result.
On teacher level we have built expertise about integration in education. There for we visited the different partner countries to exchange the ideas of inclusion, integration. The partners worked on a common publication in which we describe the way of working in the different countries together with some reflections, impressions and thoughts.
We had a lot of different activities and different themes to involve as many students as possible.
PUPILS:
-To be open minded towards European cultures:
By exchanging working methods and experiences we want to open their minds for European cultures. To achieve this we worked with audiovisual tools.
-To integrate students in mainstream schools and local community:
For future life it is important that students are included in their social environment. To achieve this we have let them work in mixed ability groups.
-To recognize strengths and increase self-esteem:
We wanted to make them aware that they have good qualities and others can learn from them. To achieve this they became an expert on a topic.
-To increase ICT-skills:
ICT can help students to gain autonomy. To achieve this we teached them how to use different ICT-tools by sharing knowledge between students.
TEACHERS:
-To share strategies about how special needs students and mainstream students can interact and cooperate:
sharing our experience can help to improve our pedagogical skills about inclusion. To achieve this we shared methodologies with our partners.
-To compare and adopt new pedagogical approaches according to integration of students in society:
To achieve this we exchanged expertise by observing strategies and methodologies in other countries.
-Improve ICT, language and communication skills:
To achieve this we organised some training sessions on different communication and ICT-tools.
-To value the importance of working together to achieve a common goal:
We believe that knowledge building in teamwork requires some complex processes (discussing, reflecting). To achieve this we organised a possibility to collaborate in our own school and with school partners.
Most of the time the project coordinators of the 4 countries interact by e-mail.
We also had 6 project meetings with teachers and students travelling to the partner countries.
We were scared to travel with our special needs students because of the language. We learned that there is nog reason for fear, because especially our students are very good in communicating by trial and error. They always found a way to understand eachother and ask what they wanted to know.
Others can learn out of the information we collected about inclusion in the different partner schools. The activities and workshops we organised with our students are perfectly usable by others. The step-by-step schemes and descriptions of the tasks are on the Twinspace and can be used.