O1- Open Schooling Roadmap
The SNAC project will develop and offer teachers an Open Schooling Roadmap as a reference document for their work in the project. It will be translated by the partners in their native language.
The Open Schooling Roadmap will propose a concrete overview of the implementation of open schooling approaches, offering a clear description of the necessary steps that schools will need to take in order to become hubs of responsible innovation that bring together as many stakeholders as possible with an aim to produce ideas and solutions that address local issues and challenges. Additionally, is will focus on the specific example of seismology education to support the implementation of the project activities as a state of the art approach in the introduction of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the school settings.
The Open Schooling Roadmap offers a clear and step-by-step outline of how a SNAC school can embark on the process of opening up to its local community, through the use of RRI-enriched student- projects, engaging students in real-life projects that are proposing innovative solutions adopted to the local conditions by employing real‐problem solving skills, dealing with real seismic data that they students have acquired themselves, handling and studying situations and participating in meaningful and motivating science inquiry activities on earthquake disaster prevention and mitigation.
Implementing the Open Schooling agenda will:
– Provide unique professional development experiences for school staff
– Enable participating schools to connect with local stakeholders, research centers and science centers, policymakers and community members
– Expand students, teachers and school heads horizons by enabling them to work with partner schools on learning and scientific activities, using the network of existing seismometers, developing new seismometers and conduct experiments with students and teachers from other schools of the SNAC network.
– Improve teaching and learning through interdisciplinary and project-based learning while assessing innovative practices and providing valuable feedback on students’ performance
– Raise the profile of the schools on the SNAC network by guiding them to be part of international activities which signal that a school is ambitious, with bold expectations for its students and staff. These schools are expected to develop innovative curricula, or implement new ways of teaching, all of which increase school’s standing and influence at local, national and international level.
– Lead to the recognition of the important part that students can play as peer enquirers/researchers and welcomes their active involvement. GR
O1-
Open Schooling Roadmap
The SNAC project will develop and offer teachers an Open Schooling Roadmap as a reference document for their work in the project. It will be translated by the partners in their native language.
O2- Training Programme for Teachers and School Heads
Based on the Open Schooling Roadmap (O1), a complete Training Programme addressing Teachers and School Heads will be developed in O2. This Training Programme will provide participant teachers and school heads with practical knowledge, background information and guidance on how to implement the necessary changes and with the intervention skills to best plan and then diffuse innovation in their own schools, helping them to evolve to an Open Schooling Environment, establishing Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principles as they are described in O1. The training framework will include materials and resources for the integration of the SNAC project activities to the school curriculum. It will describe how the theme of seismology can be integrated in the curriculum and how it can be used as a reference point for a) the development of whole-school project and activities and b) the effective collaboration of the school with the external stakeholders
The offered resources and tools, although associated with a broad range of curriculum areas, do not impose a fixed curriculum but support a model that can be customized based on location and culture, as well as cross-disciplinary situations, being thus ideal to be used in the European context for differentiated instruction.
Contents of the Training Programme:
– Establishing RRI principles in your school
– Innovation & openness for beginners: from individual efforts to holistic action plans
– Introducing innovation to competent schools: from essential change to acceleration
– Facilitating open, more effective and efficient co‐design, co‐creation, and use of educational content (both from formal and informal providers), tools and services for personalized learning and teaching
– Guiding your school to become an innovation hub using the example of the SNAC approach.
– Learning to develop new, configure or use existing seismometers and seismological data.
– Design of whole-school projects
– Establishing Effective collaboration with external stakeholders
The programme will be enriched with examples and practices to offer to teachers and school heads references for their work in the framework of the project. The training programme will be developed following a modular approach offering the opportunity to teachers and school heads who have already experience in the implementation of similar practices to follow only the specific sections that are necessary for their work.
O2- Training Programme for Teachers and School Heads
Based on the Open Schooling Roadmap (O1), a complete Training Programme addressing Teachers and School Heads will be developed in O2. This Training Programme will..
O3- Open Platform for Scientific Data
SNAC will use and expand the existing network of the SSE project installed seismometers. SSE’s impact was only linked with the teachers and students of the specific schools. SSE was a ground breaking in the area of teaching techniques in natural sciences, as it managed to establish a South Eastern European/Mediterranean School Network of digital seismographs for the monitoring of the seismic waves across different regions and countries. During the implementation of SSE, vast data of seismographic activities have been collected. The proposed SNAC platform will utilize this scientific material and transform it to an educational tool through an intuitive interface and the latest advancements on data visualization. Furthermore, SNAC will contribute to the connection of participating schools to their local society by transforming them to Nodes of Education and Awareness about Earthquakes, through Citizen Science Projects, with the support of local Research Centers, Science Centres and Universities and the active engagement of parents and other local stakeholders to innovative STEM students’ projects, contests and activities. For this to be feasible and successful it is essential that participant schools, teachers and students will be able to easily share the data they collect with their installed devices. To achieve this in an effective, semi-automated and user friendly way the project plans to develop a dedicated software tool/plugin that will facilitate this task. The final objective is that all the data collected by the foreseen installed instruments (of the order of 30 across 5 countries) will be continuously uploaded and stored in a central pubic data bank. The data will be available in standard seismological format (sac files) and will be freely available not only to the schools of the network but also to schools, researchers and scientists worldwide.
O3- Open Platform for Scientific Data
SNAC will use and expand the existing network of the SSE project installed seismometers. SSE’s impact was only linked with the teachers and students of the specific schools.
O4- Evaluation Methodology, Analysis of Results
Project strengths and weaknesses can be identified through evaluation. Evaluation procedures focus on measuring the outcomes and the changes that this project has affected. Since the participants are core to the success of the project, in the long run, project sustainability will depend on the degree to which participants benefit directly, short-term and long-term, from experiences and services within the framework of the project. In this output the consortium will develop and describe a detailed comprehensive evaluation and validation plan and methodology in order to assess progress and achieved results and to estimate the effectiveness and impact of all work realized throughout the duration of the project. The goal is to measure effectiveness and quality of the offered training guides and handbooks, e.g. the pedagogical framework, the methodological guidebook with respect to implementation in schools and the use of the offered hardware sensors and related software tools, but also the effectiveness, quality and impact of the offered teacher induction seminars and training hands-on workshops.
The plan and methodology will mainly aim to map the impact and the effectiveness, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of the proposed project at three levels, namely at student level, at teacher level and finally at institutional/school level. The first target group of the joint work mainly involves students aged 12-18 and the development of their content and concept knowledge, their skills and attitudes. The project evaluation work will mainly focus on estimating the impact of the project overall activities on the following distinct areas:
- students’ ability to handle and operate experimental techniques to conduct a scientific investigation/inquiry
- students’ ability or enhancement to code, record and analyse data with the offered hardware sensors and software tools
- enhancement of students’ problem solving competence and interdisciplinary thinking
- creation and/or change and/or enhancement of a positive attitude towards STEM disciplines
- creation and/or change and/or enhancement of critical thinking and understanding of the concept of civic responsibility
With respect to participant teachers the project aims to assess and estimate effectiveness and impact at the following areas:
- how effective was the offered training seminars and workshops
- to what extent participant teachers developed interdisciplinary educational activities
- to what extent participant teachers collaborated with other teachers in their school or other schools
With respect to institutional/school level the project aims to assess and estimate:
- to what extent school authority encouraged or facilitated participation of its staff teachers in trainings and teacher development programmes
- to what extent school authority encouraged or facilitated development of interdisciplinary educational activities e.g. by altering school’s timetable so that teachers from different STEM disciplines can work together
- to what extent schools collaborated or plan to collaborate in the future with other schools in their area/region/country or other countries
- to what extent the participation of the schools in the SNAC project was considered as recognition or distinction of achievement and further facilitated the participation in other projects and initiatives
O4- Evaluation Methodology, Analysis of Results
Project strengths and weaknesses can be identified through evaluation. Evaluation procedures focus on measuring the outcomes and the changes that this project has affected.
O5- Recommendations for Future Use
The pedagogical guide, educational material and training toolkits that will be developed by SNAC will be aligned with the current curricula reform in the participating countries and especially in Greece, where the Institute of Education Policy is proposing the integration of science subjects of the last two high school grades to a new lesson entitled “Inquiry Problems of Physical Sciences”.
The last phase of the project focuses on:
- the consolidation of achieved results
- the reflection on the overall strategy and approach
- the barriers or difficulties experienced in each country
- the presentation of success stories or cases of high impact at school, teacher or student level
- and finally on recommendations for uptake and on strategies for scale-up
The outcomes of this activity will be documented in output O5-Recommendations for Future Use. It will furnish valuable information that will facilitate the partners’ communication with educationa authorities and other stakeholders of their countries about the possible exploitation of the project’soutcomes in different or wider settings and also countries.The construction of the output will address all the necessary information behind the project’s philosophy, goals and strategy form its early phase until its implementation in school classrooms. It will summarize all the work done by teachers and schools in the participating countries and also identify and show cases of best-practice or cases of achievements beyond expectations e.g. especially from or in disadvantaged areas or schools that face plethora of obstacles.
The Recommendations for Future Use intends to give a concise and thorough overview of the project’s overall framework and results and to guide and to support anyone interested in it, from teachers and teacher educators to all individuals and stakeholders involved in educational processes to effectively follow the project approach in developing and offering innovative educational activities and teaching practices. It will also present the main guidelines, lessons learned and recommendations of designing and implementing such project in the best possible way to guarantee results and to avoid mistakes and common pitfalls.
O5- Recommendations for Future Use
The pedagogical guide, educational material and training toolkits that will be developed by SNAC will be aligned with the current curricula reform in the participating countries.