Erasmus+

Headed by Tempus Public Foundation, ‘Effect’ project consortium has undertaken to develop a European Methodology Framework, designed to promote teachers' collaborative learning.

It seeks to create a professional and methodological guide that supports professional collaboration between teachers, communities and other players of education, as well as their mutual and joint learning, that is, collaborative learning. The finalised version of the MF may serve as a guide for teachers, teacher trainers, school heads, educational decision-makers and developers when designing professional development processes, and it will also include a practical methodological toolbox to provide practical support to collaborative learning through ideas, methodological tools and other sources of information.

Continuous professional improvement is essential for teachers, too, and it can be achieved in a number of ways. Typically, teachers set themselves individual learning goals, which does not necessarily require any cooperation with others to meet (e.g. to learn a new online learning organisation app, to broaden their knowledge in a given subject, etc.). Cooperation between teachers is characteristically found in a school environment, as it is absolutely essential for common duties at school, but it does not necessarily mean professional development (e.g. developing syllabuses in a work team). In contrast, teachers’ collaborative learning means the process of collective professional development of a teacher community, based on learning-focused interaction among participants. It is a structured process where teachers work together to solve one or more professional issues which have arisen in practice, and specify its framework and the cohesive motivational force during the self-reflective process.

In order to test the collaborative learning framework and the related practical methodological toolbox, a piloting process has been launched in three partner countries, Hungary, Latvia and the Czech Republic. During the piloting process, we sought to test the methodological framework in various subject matters and target groups, according to national characteristics. The process lasted for a year, from autumn 2016 to autumn 2017. The pilot project organised by Tempus Public Foundation supported collaborative learning through the creative use of digital educational methods and ICT tools.

Below, we will present a few practices which we tested during the piloting process, and which were designed to support the collaborative learning of teacher communities seeking to improve their use of digital educational methods. In this form, the practices described here may provide help to teachers and facilitators in the creative use of ICT tools and combining cooperative learning methods. Available from spring 2018, the online framework and practical methodological toolbox will summarise the best practices supporting teachers' collaborative learning, including the ones mentioned above.

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