"ContextRapidly changing skills needs, transforming jobs and the increasingly challenging task of motivating and educating students often with accumulated experiences of school failure and poor basic competences require us to rethink teaching and learning in VET. The Cedefop research study ""Vocational pedagogies and benefits for learners: practices and challenges in Europe (2015) examined the role played by learning outcomes approaches in pedagogical change in initial VET in 15 EU Member States, including three of our LS4VET partner countries: Hungary, Malta and the Netherlands. It has found that though pedagogical change is often advocated, it has not or not successfully been implemented. To ensure effective, high quality VET, teachers/trainers need to continuously improve not only their vocation-specific competences, but also their pedagogical-methodological skills. Therefore, there is a strong need to introduce effective and sustainable forms of their continuous professional development also in this regard.Increasing evidence shows that schools where teachers work collaboratively and develop a high level of “professional capital” outperform those where teachers work in isolation. Teacher communities of practice are the natural and primary venue of teacher learning, however, they enhance teacher professional development most if they are based on deep professional collaboration. Teacher collaboration plays a vital role in various elements of teachers’ work and has been found to have a positive impact on teaching quality and student performance. An effective model of teacher professional development based on deep teacher collaboration and focusing on the improvement of student learning through improving teachers’ methodological skills is Lesson Study (LS). ObjectivesThe LS4VET project aims to adapt Lesson Study methodology for the sector of vocational education and training (VET) in order to achieve deep and sustainable impact. The Lesson Study approach has been found to be particularly effective because: (1) it is a bottom-up approach of development, where professional development (PD) is done not “to” but “by and with” the teachers;(2) it is job-embedded and focuses on teachers’ real classroom concerns in order to improve student learning through teachers’ learning of new teaching methods and changing their teaching practice and(3) it involves deep teacher collaboration when teachers actively learn through designing, teaching, evaluating and researching lessons together over an extended period of time.Target group: VET teachers and trainersSecondary target group: teacher educatorsBeneficiaries: VET studentsMethodologyThe adaptation will be carried out in a close collaboration of expert partners (teacher educators) and VET schools, supported by formal training (an e-learning course) and continuous support (mentoring) for VET teachers and trainers to learn, adapt and pilot the method of LS in their own schools. The project builds on the multi-directional collaboration of expert partners with extensive expertise and experience regarding the method of LS and training teachers to apply it, VET schools as well as an e-learning adult training provider institution from four countries (Hungary, Austria, Malta and the Netherlands).OutcomesAll activities planned for the project are aimed to produce high quality intellectual outcomes as follows:IO1 - Model for LS4VET - a theoretical model providing guidelines for the adaptation of Lesson Study as a method of teacher professional development and education quality improvement to the special context of vocational education and training (VET).IO2 - LS4VET training course - an online course based on active learning, preparing participants to implement a Lesson Study in their own schools and apply 21st century teaching methods and digital pedagogy IO3 - LS4VET Storyboard and Toolkit - a complex set of guides and tools for planning and implementing a Lesson Study adapted for VET schoolsIO4 - LS4VET eBook - a handbook for teachers and VET school leaders, presenting the LS4VET model, case studies of the pilots as well as recommendations for policy makers. ImpactThe immediate result of the project will be that the methodology and handbook of an effective model of teacher professional development, the use of which is steadily spreading all around the world but has only sporadically applied in VET schools so far, will be available for VET teachers/trainers in a form that has been adapted for the special context of VET. The long term impact relates to the main idea of the project: instead of “delivering” professional development to teachers, LS4VET intends to encourage and assist the teaching staff of VET schools to become a professional learning community by providing complex methodology and toolkit for VET teachers based on the Lesson Study methodology that can effectively enhance teacher collaboration and through that, teacher learning and education"

"Despite overall European efforts to get more students in VET, to decrease the drop out rate in VET, to raise image of VET, we haven´t found the turning point that is really successful. This goes for almost all the countries, educations and colleges within VET in Europe. Despite clear agendas from national governments we still face a lack of students and graduated workers in many fields. We all want to, and have an interest in, changing this fact. We want to raise image of VET, get more students in VET, get better teaching and happier students. This project will share good practices and attack this issue from a quality perspective. The partners have chosen five actions that we will combine, complement and learn from throughout and after the project period. The overall goal is to learn from each other, share knowledge and actions and complement own findings with the findings of partners and increase our competences and be able to transform the data from quality reviews, research and action findings into the classroom. Be a better teacher, to ""make"" better students and better organisations. This benefits society as well. The five actions are: -Student's selfevaluation and combined student-teacher's evaluation -Meeting between student and teacher. Research of motivation in the classroom -Student's evaluation of education -EQUAVET as a tool for improving quality in education through student's voice -Teacher's preparation for class focused, in team and in mind map/fixed scheme & evaluation of teaching. We expect that this new approach and combination of looking into quality from different angles and perspectives, will provide us with new tools and complement the objectives of the project. Objectives of project: -Qualifying teachers to enhance better teaching -Share and test tools -Translate quality data to better teaching -Involving students in teaching and learning -Having happy, motivated students To do this we'll work with our chosen actions at our respective colleges. We will have two learning/teaching/training activities together. Participants are two steering group members from each college and two teachers. Between our meetings and at the activity meetings we work first with own issue/action at the first training activity meeting. Following this meeting we work in home college, and secondly we work with new actions from partner college. In this way we share our experiences, learn new ways of dealing with subjects, learn on own body new actions that will strenghten our quality work. Activities are teaching in class, interviewing students, perform evaluations with and between students, make observations in classroom and more. Participants are, a part from the steering group, two teachers from each participating college. The teachers will work in student classes with the given actions. They will work with the actions they know from own college, and they will work with an action from partner college. These activities take place at activity-meetings and between meetings. Our key target is students, but teachers are the target group in the methodology. The project will use socalled Action Theory to get an overview of our actions and objectives. We will work with: 1. A context analysis; characteristics of the students in the different countries; 2. Presentation of quality management system. Choose a methodology to investigate the quality of the best practices. Describe indicators of quality. 3. Identifying best practices within own college 4. Exchanging best practices with teachers from all countries adopting each other's best practice 5. Evaluate the applied best practices with students and teachers 6. Recommendations published, making presentation for participants to use. Create an online platform with all best practices and tools and a webinar. 7. Hosting a work shop and webinar We expect the following impact Students: More active in class, more motivated for education, increased fulfillment rate, happier students, better student-teacher relation. Teachers/participants:Transformation of quality data into better classroom teaching, better teaching competences, increased intercultural competences, better perception's competences, extended personal competences in a professionel frame Organisations: Enhanced quality level, better image, look at, and talk about quality in a new way Longer term benefits: Increased quality in education Increased number of happy, motivated student Increased number of students, that full fill their education Other findings will be: Better knowledge , skills and competence regarding inter/transcultural performances, both professionally and individual and for the benefit of the organisation and VET education overall. The project will, at it's best, give us tools to change the way we teach, the way student's learn and the way we organize our colleges."

"After the first QUAL4T project, that focused on quality awareness by individual teachers, it deemed only a small step to a follow-up project named: Further Quality Improvement in European VET, guiding teacher Teams in their strategic planning (QUAL4T2). In QUAL4T2 the project partners aimed to contribute directly to the improvement of outcomes of quality systems in Europe's institutes, by investing in teachers’ professionalization to develop more effectiveness and involvement of teachers/trainers in the quality strategic planning. After evaluation and analyses, as a follow up teams need to set aims and plan actions for further improvement. In the 0-questionnaire teachers stated that they feel they don’t have enough knowledge and tools to write a good year plan, and that often they daubt if they are performing the right actions for the aimed improvement or change. So the project partners started to develop products fitting with the needs of the teacher teams!Quality guide and toolkit for teamsThe guide and tools were first developed in a pilot version, so that they could be tested and improved. After the pilot in the five partner organisations we could conclude that the Quality tools and the guide that we tested, inluenced both the teamculture as the efficiency of the team plan in a positive way! Nevertheless, the partners from Netherlands, Spain, Denmark and Italy asked the teams once more for feedback, and guide and tools have been improved for the final version. The Greek partner desided as an extra to test a number of tools as well, delivering extra input for the final versions. The transnational pilot report gathered all the outcomes of the pilots per partner, and also overall outcomes. SWOT analyses have been included in all partner chapters. The themes for the Qality tools are: A - Working on a quality culture for teams, B - Tools for an effective team year-plan and C - Team plan models. Tools from these theme's are for instance: Lighthouse, Feedback giving, Route to a team plan and Risk analysing. All tools have been published in Word-documents, so that teacher teams have the option to adapt the tools to their own situation.Story book This good practice guide is built up as a story book. In this book, readers travel through five Vocational Education and Training organisations in five European countries (NL, ES, EL, DK and IT) and enjoy the stories gained from teacher teams. Readers learn about the frustrations when something did not go as well expected… Share the euphoria when a success was reached… Enjoy these precious stories in which teams really move forward to further excellence in Vocational Education and Training! The Story Book includes many pictures of teams in action. It provides easy to read experiences, and may help other teams in Europe in their travel towards a good team plan.Training programmeFinally a five day transnational training programme took place in Rome, for a mixed group of partners' staff, thus preparing the participants to be ambassadors for the project after the project ends. All participants in the training event found the project results very relevant for their work. Some were less experienced and they were very happy with the training. Even the more experienced mentioned that they found very useful the exchange and they learned about new tools to implement in their quality assurance system. Based on the revised training, a program was developed that is available online for all EU schools or training centres. Like all the final products the training program options have been published on the website www.qual4t-project.org free for use. But also through the EACEA disseminiation platform, European schoolgateway and websites as EQAVET and EfVET the project products can be found.EvaluationThe project meetings and the project process and products were all evaluated with the aim to further improve after reflection of the previous period. One partner testimonial in the latest evaluation: ""In this final semester of the project it is possible to reflect on the reactions of the target group. It is difficult to score the Quality guide, as this guide is integrated in the explanation of the three themes of the Qualty tools. The tools are the real documents that teams use, and with the explanation of the guide the combination is very effective. This is the same for the Story Book, being a red line in workshops, integrating tools where needed, depending on the target groups. In the end, we always return to the office empty handed, while we took extra hard copies with us to workshops… ImpactIn all partner organisations a sustainable impact has shown. Besided this, also expected impact is shown on national level. The seven Multiplier Events prommiss good mainstreaming after the project life time and a new transnational training has been planned for 2020! Altogether QUAL4T2 project helped to make VET a bit more attractive!"

The Suscop project has been a very interesting project for the partners. We have been working on a topic that is extremely important for the future, we are benefitting of the results, for students, teachers and on the long run for society to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.Now we, especially the Western world, are consuming a lot of meat which has a high impact on the environment. As the prediction is that the world’s population is growing until 10 billion people in 2050, we are heading toward a food crisis. If we want to be able to feed the people living on this planet in a proper way, we have to change our eating habits.Part of the solution is using different proteins, both from vegetal as animal based sources. This has to become mainstream to be part of the solution. The growing of crickets, for example, has a low impact on the environment and can be monitored very well. It needs only a small percentage of the resources that are needed to produce meat. There are different ways to grow alternative proteins, with very high quality and with a low impact on the environment, that can play an important role in the food chain of the future.The objective was to make a teaching and training module for students in different EQF levels, from level 3 – 6. Next to that we wanted to train teachers so a larger group of teachers will be able to use the materials in the education of their students. On the website we have created, https://suscop.com/ we make the results available in different levels and languages.The most important product we delivered is a ten week teaching and training module with a workload of appr. 80 hours. There are three different aspects: theory about working with alternative proteins, different types of proteins, what are the rules and regulations, storage, etc. The second topic is sustainability, why is this new way of cooking needed, what is the connection with the SDG’s and the third topic is the actual cooking itself, working in the kitchen with the proteins.The teachers manual contains all the instructions any teacher might need to start doing classes like this themselves, a list with the proteins with all the specifications and also extra materials to present to the students, like videos, PowerPoints, quizzes.There is an E-book with recipes from all partners in six different categories, from street food to a 5 course dinner. Students can use this E-book in the practical lessons and in the assignment that they have to do at the end of the training module. During the life span of the project we organised five TPM and two LTTA’s. In the TPM’s we discussed the progress of the project, because of the Covid-19 pandemic we had to extend the project, and it was at time complicated to find the time to work on the project. So we also have met online on a regular basis to keep the work going.The LTTA’s were used to train the project group at two levels, the first one was focusing on the theoretical foundation of working with alternative proteins. A Spanish researcher was invited to give the most recent state of the art (legislation in Europe, what is already done etc.) and our HVET partner trained the group. Also a Finnish company EntoCube, a producer of animal based alternative proteins, updated the knowledge of the project team.In the second LTTA there were chef-teachers and students involved, they were working in the kitchen with the recipes, trying out and giving feedback on the results.Another output was the train the trainer short course, the partners have trained their colleagues so a larger group of teachers is capable to work with the materials. Also for teachers this is a new way of looking at eating habits in the future, so this gave very interesting discussions. The ‘cascaded’ training was executed organisations and it helped to change the attitude of the participants.We have done a lot of activities to disseminate the results. The Multiplier Events were unfortunately not easy to organise, but still we managed to talk about the results with a large group of network partners. There was publicity in newspapers, presentations in primary schools, on the EfVET conference and many other articles in newsletters nationally and internationally.One of the side effects of this project is that the restaurant in Da Vinci College has added some of the recipes to their menu!The partner colleges will use the materials in their regular education as this is part of innovation of the profession. For students the market of the alternative proteins can open up a lot of new possibilities, thy can open their own business, cooking or selling alternative proteins. In the LTTA with students in Harderwijk we offered a workshop with an entrepreneur who makes a living of growing and selling crickets and writer on the topic.The pandemic caused serious difficulties in reaching the goals, we had to extend the project with 9 months.

"According to the European Lifelong Guidance Policies, career guidance should be based on the European framework of the Career Management Skills (CMS) because it represents the set of competences and skills each person needs to take strategic e suitable decisions about the own future. MY FUTURE project stressed the main findings of a previous project (Learning and decision making resources Project Number 2014-1-IT02-KA200-004105) to improve and develop innovative practices and career learning tools for school systems in Europe. Learning Career Management Skills is pivotal for the implementation of the European Lifelong Guidance policy and for reaching the goals of the Education and Employment strategies.Furthermore, the growing of the information and communication technologies in the field of lifelong guidance opened new opportunities to integrate theoretical and participatory research findings with digital technologies that enable teachers and practitioners to get a concrete impact in the development of the career management skills of youth and youngers.Main objectives of MYFUTURE were:1- Supporting schools to tackle early school leaving2 - Developing assessment and evaluation methods and practices to improve the quality of Career Guidance at school, involving the local career guidance systems and the main stakeholders; 3 - Strengthening the capability of schools to cooperate and share open web resources with Municipalities, Local Authorities, Public Employment Services and Universities.4 - Identifying and developing innovative teaching and learning approaches, methods and ICT resources that effectively support the development of Career Guidance activities at school;5 - Sharing and spreading the European concept and framework of Career Management Skills, as transversal key competences for managing lifelong study and work transitions;6 - Providing coherent and ""user friendly"" tools and learning materials for students, teachers and school counsellors, in different languages.The partnership was a balanced mix of competences and knowledge made by academic institutions, with experts and researchers, and public and private providers of career guidance at school:1-The University of Camerino (Italy): Lead partner2- Regione Marche (Italy)3- Centre Studi Pluriversum (Italy)4-The University of Derby (United Kingdom)5-Hertfordshire County Council (United Kingdom)6-UU-Lillebælt (Denmark)7-University of Malta (Malta)8-CMBRAE Bucuresti (Romania)The methodological approach of the project was based on the participatory action research, with direct involvement of students, teachers and career practitioners to set out priorities and to share best practices and resources.Main activities implemented were:-Organization of focus groups with students and teachers in each partner countries;-Construction and sharing of questionnaires to collect data on needs, practices and tools;-Analysis of data and production of relevant knowledge in the field of career guidance practices;- Setting out and sharing guidelines for using the tools and to design guidance activities;-Development of open educational resources available on-line freely;-Development of ICT tools for teachers and students;-Dissemination of the project activities in events at national and international level;-Organization of conference seminars and training activities for teacher and career guidance practitioners.During the implementation of these activities were involved 174 students and practitioners for the field research, more than 205 questionnaires were administrated, 1152 among students and practitioners took part to the pilot actions, 121 participants attended the multiplier events,333 people subscribed the website, more than 1000 practitioners were reach with the social network and on line articles, 369 users download document from the platform.The intellectual outputs produced were:IO1-Developing career education. Publication.IO2-The potential of e-portfolios in career guidance. An innovative web site.IO3-Enhancing the quality of career guidance. The handbook for schools, with the on line check list to self evalutate quality standards.IO4-The map of career guidance. IO5-Career guidance App. A new tool for mobile phones.IO6-E-learning platform for teachers and practitionersThe products were designed for students services that reach ever-increasing numbers of young people in a cost effective and efficient way. The e-learning platform and the open education resources guarantee an increasing impact on the regional systems in each partner country. All the partner are implementing activities and planning new programmes based on the evidences of MYFUTURE project. The contacts achieved during the dissemination are creating new partnership and enlarging the communities of teachers an practitioners interesting in the development of digital resources and tools for career guidance at school.info on www.myfutureproject"