Abstract:

In this COMENIUS project, Call 2013, TRIGGER offers a new teaching approach combined with new learning materials about Internationalization and new skills, such as being adaptive for changes, being a team player, being an active EU citizen, being curious, interactive and taking care of the environment. The designed materials provide a complete range of the CFEC domains and are very interesting for ELOS and Unesco schools, but also for each secondary school that wants to offer their pupils an international learning programme..

Education has the challenge to deliver learners that are ready to compete on the global market. Europe must invest in the quality of education if it is to meet the challenges of youth unemployment. TRIGGER project aims to develop a new methodology for the teachers that will help them to teach their pupils to become active Europeans. The project is about: “Trigger teachers and learners, through including new skills and internationalization in the educational programme for secondary schools.

In each EU country, the Common Framework for Europe Competence (CFEC) is a perfect start to prepare youth to become tomorrow's European citizens. With its domains and levels it offers structure for a good International orientation programme. However, the framework and new skills have to be implemented in secondary education. And in many countries the learning method could use a renewal, sometimes being the opposite of showing the youth how to be flexible or enterprising. Teachers still struggle with the task how to implement EU competences and new skills in the classroom, this is why we started this two year project in October 2013.

The project partners are: Coordinator Landstede Group/Agnieten College (NL), Politeknika Ikastegia Txorierri (ES), Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (DE), Liceul Teoretic GEORGE CALINESCU (RO) and Flora Vidaregåande Skule (NO).

TRIGGER toolkit products (12 Learner Tasks, a curriculum planner and a Teacher Handbook) have been developed and are already available on the website in five of the six aimed languages: Dutch, English, Norwegian, Romanian and Spanish. (The German language wil be provided in summer 2015).

The Teacher Handbook provides a ready-to-use methodology to systematically integrate internationalisation and mobility in the curriculum.

The Learner Tasks promote internationalisation and mobility by providing the possibility to train the competences mentioned in the ‘Common Framework for Europe Competence’ (CFEC. It provides indicators for the Europe-related competences of pupils between 12 and 19 years) and the new skills such as being adaptive for changes, being a team player, being an active EU citizen, being curious, interactive and taking care of the environment agenda. What makes these tasks so useful is that they can be used directly to easily integrate and assess the CFEC competences and the new skills into the teaching.

All products can be downloaded for free from the website www.trigger-project.org

Keywords:

Secondary education, new skills, internationalisation, ELOS, Unesco, Europe citizens, Comenius project, teachers.