Last month, Mrs Corr & Mrs Somerville travelled to Reykjavik in Iceland to take part in a week long course "Project Based Learning" with Smart Teachers Play More as part of our Erasmus Plus KA1 project.
STPM had 5 courses running that week so over 95 people had gathered from around Europe and it was an amazing opportunity to meet new people and learn about the education systems around the world.
Our course was about how one school in Iceland had begun to rethink how they taught their pupils - several teachers from different departments have come together to teach pupils in a more cohesive way e.g. instead of pupils having separate ICT lessons, Art or History lessons the teachers work together to allow students to complete their work in a way that suits them best. What struck Mrs Somerville & I the most was that this is exactly how preschool operates - we don't teach maths, literacy, art etc. as separate subjects, instead all resources can offer opportunities to cover every area of the curriculum. We had 2 trainers for the week Thor & Sigge and their passion for their jobs shone through. They helped us see how we could be more foccussed when planning activities and have very clear learning goals.
We had some other preschool teachers on the course from Estonia, some primary teachers form Slovenia, Spain, Tenerife & Italy and some secondary teachers from Greece, Italy & Spain. We all shared some practice form our own schools and it was wonderful to see lots of ideas form the other schools.
We had opportunities to visit Thor's school, where pupils are aged 6-16. The most noticeable things were that the pupils don't wear shoes indoors and that the teachers were not fixated on pupils having to sit at desks to learn, some were on the floor, some lying on their desks etc. The school had a very relaxed atmosphere.
We had a lot of snow the week we visited and yet life went on as normal, we had learned to buy spikes for our boots when we visited in December and we certainly needed them again.
I had the chance to visit our Erasmus Partner school in Hafnarfjordur and also another one in Kopavorgur & I got lots of ideas of how we can introduce an even more relaxed Scandinavia feel to Windmill - starting with the childcare not wearing shoes indoors at all.
The biggest issue for schools here compared to Reykjavik is the staffing levels - we would need at least 3 adults per class to allow for such an approach where children are working in small group most of the time rather than as one large class.
On one day we toured the Golden Circle and saw beautiful waterfalls and geysers. We were also fortunate enough to see the Northern Lights one night.
This KA1 project is almost finished with just one more course and a job shadow to be completed.
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