Teachers Experiences

Date: 2014.06.05

Posted by Julien Lecomte, Gilles Fossion and Erika Benkö (Université de Paix) (Belgium)

Message: We have based this comment on our experience as supervisors in the pilot project “well-being units” in schools.
This pilot project is part of a project that brings together three ministries (Education, Health and Equal chances, Youth and Youth Aid): “the policy regarding well-being at school will be thought in the long-term. It will be integrated in a global well-being project modulated according to the context and needs. It will foster interactive methods built in partnership with young people” (from enseignement.be)
In this framework “Université de Paix” assisted ten schools during two years. We are recognised as a youth organisation. Our specificity is violence prevention and conflict management. Our interventions fostered dialogue between the different stakeholders at school or related to school, including the students, the teachers, the headmasters, counsellors and other professionals who work occasionally or not with the school (speech therapists, psychologists, etc.), parents, the parent association, associations to promote health and protection of environment, the municipality, etc.

Reading the experience, several factors seem to be behind the success of this project: the students’ reference framework, needs and aspirations being taken into account. Indeed, it fosters participation and a sense of security in order to achieve a group cohesion and cooperation between its members.

A second factor seems to be fruitful: project pedagogy, in which everyone feels involved and raises awareness about one’s responsibilities and skills, from its design to the final implementation of the project. It develops self-esteem and confidence, which are necessary to learning.

A participative project in which stakeholders feel involved and work in open-mindedness is more likely to succeed. They will more readily negotiate arrangements, find solutions together so that the project can succeed.

Another factor: parents are also involved in this project because they are available and give their time and resources so that students can participate. It is an important lever, because several stakeholders get together and are in favour of the project. Targeting resource people and counting on them can also help the project succeed.

Let’s not forget the headteacher’s support, which is crucial to the project. It feeds the need of acknowledgment, including that of students’ and teachers’ motivation, the driving force of the project!

Date: 2014.05.22

Posted by Mariapia Piemontese [email protected] (High Secondary School Country: Italy)

Message: This experience shows how sharing common goals during adolescence is a key factor in personal growth.
The author successfully describes difficulties faced by students when approaching school contents, notwithstanding the fact that the subjects involved were not directly linked to the traditional cognitive aspect of school subjects.
Portuguese fellow teachers did not stop when facing repeated refusals. On the other hand they questioned themselves and re-thought their role within the teaching/learning context, the latter being in a state of risking a series of inevitable failures.

First I would like to point out the effectiveness of experience that has made the project possible as a whole: students actively participated in the projects and they worked efficiently on easily accessible sub-goals. They proceeded step by step accepting teachers as their guides who, in more strictly educational contexts, would have been rejected by students, and they saw themselves as “creators” of their own initiatives. I think that the idea of “endorsing a cause”, although geographically distant from their own situation, has been the motivation that made them feel able to act. In order to do so, teachers had to make use tools known by students they were dealing with: thus, they moved away from content-oriented patterns and they experimented successful working methods, that can also be transferred to contexts outside school. These are extremely exemplary interventions of how to make students acquire flexible and wide skills. For example: the educational meaning of research and focused study that students carried out in order to acquire facts concerning Rwanda; the graphic and artistic planning that preceded the actual production phase ; the phase of assigning and accepting tasks within working groups.

Last, I would like to stress the key role of synergy of those who contributed to the success of this experience: first of all, the students, with all their difficulties; teachers, who drew on their creativity in order to overcome problems; the school, as an open learning context that welcomed new ways of communicating and teaching.