How can the E-VET project help the school world in such a sensitive moment like this?
The E-VET – Empowering VET Teachers project, funded by the Erasmus+ programme, aims at improving the Continuous Professional Development of teachers working with foreign students.
The Covid-19 emergency has forced the school to rethink and reorganize itself in a short time through distance learning. This poses quite a few challenges to all the actors involved, starting from teachers’ computer skills and the organizational skills of the schools, to the availability of adequate technological equipment and network coverage by the families, as well as their ability to support the educational and training path of their children from home. Although everyone is doing their best, some objective difficulties remain.
We want to focus here on what are the difficulties for teachers.
Teachers have now a great need not to be left alone but rather to be continuously supported in testing new training methods and tools, they are often not familiar with. Moreover, in times of quarantine the main risk for the Italian school is to abandon its weaker students, those with fewer resources, among them foreign students. Finding new ways to continue having the right attention towards weaker students requires a strong creativity and adaptability. Teachers therefore need effective and streamlined support tools that enable them to deal with change effectively and promote the inclusion of all students.
The E-VET project can respond to this need, proposing to the teacher a path for the development and/or strengthening of transversal skills useful to face change, such as: Ethics and professionalism, Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Teamwork ability, Multicultural environments management skills. The project, through a virtual platform, aims to accompany teachers in a path to discover and strengthen their soft skills. In particular, the EVET platform offers first of all an online analysis tool to self-assess their key soft skills, useful to teach in a multicultural environment. Based on the results of the test, teachers have the possibility to access an open online course, divided into modules and structured as an interactive learning environment with motivational activities and gamification elements, with the possibility of self-assessment, to strengthen the soft skills that were found to be weaker.
E-VET is also a suitable tool for this time: the opportunity for continuous professional development described is for free and offered to those interested exclusively through the project’s online platform, available not only in Italian, but also in English, Bulgarian, Spanish, Greek and Polish. It is therefore a valid training solution especially in quarantine time.
Do you want to participate? Quarantine time is the right time! The project is preparing for the second pilot phase, the test of the course modules, which will be launched in May.
Who is it addressed to? E-VET is aimed in particular at teachers, with specific reference to those who are newly qualified and work in multicultural contexts, in educational institutions, institutions active in formal, non-formal and informal training, public administrations, NGOs active in multicultural sectors.
How to participate? Follow us on the project socials (Facebook: @EVETproject and @InEuropa and Twitter: @EVETProject1 and @InEuropa_UE) and get ready! We will soon inform you about the date of a forthcoming webinar where the use of the platform will be introduced so that you can test it and improve your soft skills with E-VET.