Open Schooling Summer School 2021
5-9 July 2021
The “Towards an Open and e-Mature School” Summer School aims to familiarize participants with the open schooling approach that provides a powerful framework for school heads and teachers to engage, discuss and explore: how schools need to evolve, transform and reinvent; how schools facilitate open, more effective and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of educational content tools and services for personalized science learning and teaching; how schools can become innovation incubators and accelerators.
It has been designed to promote the use of self-reflection tools as a vehicle to support innovation and systemic change in schools. It proposes an innovation support framework and a roadmap to schools seeking to introduce a change culture that ensures a meaningful uptake of sustainable innovation. It will focus on the use of self-reflection tools as a valid way to support innovation and systemic change in education. Participants will explore how schools may move from self-reflection to developing a comprehensive plan of action that utilises the results of a self-evaluation exercise, but, crucially, in combination with fundamental principles and mechanisms of European educational policy for schools.
Furthermore, the summer school will introduce the New European Bauhaus, a creative and interdisciplinary initiative, convening a space of encounter to design future ways of living, situated at the crossroads between art, culture, social inclusion, science and technology. It brings the Green Deal to our living places and calls for a collective effort to imagine and build a future that is sustainable, inclusive and beautiful for our minds and for our souls. The New European Bauhaus initiative is a vast cooperation project combining sustainability with wellbeing. The Commission’s initiative is intended to address contemporary and future ecological, economic and societal concerns. Education and lifelong learning are central to equipping current and future citizens with a deep understanding of the issues, critical thinking and skills necessary to bring about change.
The summer school will also present the concept of Digital Media Literacy for Active Citizenship to promote critical thinking and democratic values. Digital advances have brought new challenges for Europe’s pupils, students and teachers. Algorithms used by social media sites and news portals can be powerful amplifiers of bias or fake news, while data privacy has become a key concern in the digital society. EU citizens, but above all young students are vulnerable to cyber bullying and harassment, predatory behaviour or disturbing online content.
Finally, the summer school will discuss Biomimicry, an interdisciplinary approach that uses living organisms as a model to meet the challenges of sustainable development (economic, environmental and social). It will present way for enhancing competences and awareness on biomimicry in the School Community, including students, parents, teachers and directors and Informal Science Education Providers, while reinforcing the sustainability principle in schools for the whole school community.
Participants will look at how schools can be supported in using these tools to understand the current position of the organisation and build on the results to define and implement suitable action plans by applying a step by step support mechanism for school heads and teachers.
On Thursday 8/7, the morning session focuses on cybersafety in schools and classrooms. Understanding cybersafety is a rather key element in the quest for digitally mature schools in the era of AI and increased digitalization. The session is introduced by the RAYUELA project which uses a game-based approach aiming at enhancing teachers’ and students’ knowledge and skills.
For any questions, please contact zygouritsas@ea.gr
The “Towards an Open and e-Mature School” Summer School aims to familiarise participants with the open schooling approach that provides a powerful framework for school heads and teahcers to engage, discuss and explore: how schools need to evolve, transform and reinvent; how schools facilitate 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 science learning and teaching; how schools can become innovation incubators and accelerators. The main aim of this approach is to describe and implement at scale a process that facilitates the transformation of schools to innovative ecosystems, acting as shared sites of science learning for which leaders, teachers, students and the local community share responsibility, over which they share authority, and from which they all benefit through the increase of their communities’ science capital and the development of responsible citizenship.
It has been designed to promote the use of self-reflection tools as a vehicle to support innovation and systemic change in schools. It proposes an innovation support framework and a roadmap to schools seeking to introduce a change culture that ensures a meaningful uptake of sustainable innovation, with an emphasis on achieving improved learning outcomes as set by the Europe 2020 strategy.
We will focus on the use of self-reflection tools as a valid way to support innovation and systemic change in education. Participants will explore how schools may move from self-reflection to developing a comprehensive plan of action that utilises the results of a self-evaluation exercise, but, crucially, in combination with fundamental principles and mechanisms of European educational policy for schools.
Participants will look at how schools can be supported in using these tools to understand the current position of the organisation and build on the results to define and implement suitable action plans by applying a step by step support mechanism for school heads and teachers. The “Towards an Open and e-Mature School” Summer School will demonstrate the actual processes that translate the self-reflection results to concrete actions in the school as a learning ecosystem, in key areas such as Teacher CPD, school management, school openness, technology integration, innovation uptake, community engagement, social responsibility and others.
Furthermore, the “Towards an Open and e-Mature School” Summer School will present the concept of Schools as Living Labs. Living labs are user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on a systematic user co-creation approach integrating research and innovation processes in real life communities and settings. In the educational context, we engage the living lab methodology as a technique of crucial value in the heart of initiatives of open schools, which, in cooperation with other stakeholders, aspire to become agents of community well-being by creating new partnerships in their local communities.
The Summer School adopts a learning in action methodology and offers you the opportunity to identify, explore and overcome the challenges of leadership and management in a constantly changing educational environment.
The provided lectures and material of our Summer School will offer you effective and systematic guidance and support at the school leadership level in order to facilitate the introduction of the OSOS and R4C innovation process in your school and transform it into an open schooling environment.
Through this course you will gain valuable insights on how to:
- Analyse the needs of your school,
- Create lasting supporting structures for your school
- Review your teachers’ education, including CPD available, to ensure it addresses leadership competences
- Develop the culture, structures and conditions to facilitate dialogue, collaboration and knowledge exchange among your school’s community and internal stakeholders
- Promote & Collaborate with other schools, parents, higher education institutions and research centres and other external stakeholders
- Develop a strategy for dealing with resistance to change
- Reflect on the progress of organizational changes
- Create your School Development Plan and be prepared for your Erasmus+ proposal
Register to the Summer School to enhance your repertoire of teaching and learning strategies, your ability to match these to your students’ needs and your commitment to continuous learning and professional development.
Our effective professional development approach will equip you with the competences you need to act successfully as a change agent, developing a terminology necessary to describe the dynamics of innovative change processes, and making you able to recognize different forms of resistance and addressing it in their own context. Through the provided course you will learn how to:
- become a pioneering teacher who leads the team of the participating teachers in your school
- Take initiatives in order to implement innovative practices that aim to have long‐term effect on the development of your school as a whole
- Develop a strategy for involving and disseminating the results of innovative practices to the whole school community
- Explain why innovation is important to ensure long‐term success
In line with the OSOS and the R4C approach the Summer School will focus on a methodological & pedagogical framework outlining the key stages of the development of innovation support in your school by providing you with:
- Participation in online teaching and learning communities of Continuous Professional Development, relevant to your expertise and requirements.
- A guide on how you can become an author of educational content.
We would like to offer some ideas and guidelines for your preparation. The summer school will use the OSOS portal as a tool to develop innovative school projects that fit the needs of the society. We have prepared a series of webinars that include:
- Open Schooling Roadmap
- Biomimicry Activities in the Classroom
- Schools as Living Labs
- Identifying the real needs of your school
- Using self-reflection tools to set up a roadmap and an innovation strategy that transforms schools to innovative ecosystems
- Introducing RRI Principles in your school projects
You can find the recordings and presentations of the summer school here
About the Summer School
Your mission for the course will be to develop innovative school projects that fit the needs of the society.
OSOS accelerators
Take ideas by consulting the OSOS accelerators. They help innovative schools to proceed more and develop their innovative ideas to new localised projects that could provide new solutions for the school and its community, for bringing the gap between formal and informal learning settings and creating new opportunities for personalisation at different levels (student, teacher, school). You can also look into the School projects that have already been uploaded on the OSOS portal, there are currently more than 1200.
Developing your project
Focusing on the process for the creation and publication of new Projects using the OSOS portal, the following diagram presents the steps from both the Teachers and the Students. Since a Project is initiated by a Teachers this is not a linear process, since there is continues interaction between the Teacher and the Students until the Project can be considered as final and be published to the OSOS greater community.
Through the OSOS portal the Students have the possibility of interacting with their Teachers during the editing of the Project ang get the necessary guidelines and feedback until the Project become published.
When editing a new Project, the Students add their material and build their idea following four phases, as designed in the OSOS Project. These are:
In each one of these phases, the Teacher provides special guidelines to the Students on what it is expected to be provided and on the methodology and/or tools they need to use to achieve a Project that is ready to be published and during the editing process by the Students, the Teacher has again the possibility of assessing the work that is already described in the phases and provide his/her feedback supporting the process with additional guidelines and comments.
During the days of the summer school, you will have a chance to further work on your projects, apply all the features and tools of the Community of the Open Schooling Summer School at the OSOS portal and uptake the role of your students in order to finalise the projects.
| Central European Time (CEST) | 02/07/2021 | 05/07/2021 | 06/07/2021 | 07/07/2021 | 8/07/20201 | 09/07/2020 |
| 10.00 – 11.00 | Towards an open and e-mature school | Digital Media Literacy for Active Citizenship | Biomimicry in Schools | Addressing cybersafety through games Invited session with the Rayela project | Schools and zero energy buildings | |
| 11.30 – 12.30 | Schools as Living Labs | Digital Media Literacy for Active Citizenship | Biomimicry in teaching and learning | Introducing RRI principles in innovative school projects | The new Bauhaus as a case study for Open Schools | |
| 14.00 – 16:00 | Green Deal ECO²-SCHOOLS, let’s make the step beside and cooperate to test-learn-consolidate-upscale next education | Setting up a roadmap and an innovation strategy that transforms schools to innovative ecosystems | Eco2 Schools. Vision and School Role | My vision for my Eco2School | Exchanging ideas and working on projects | Open discussion |
Reflecting for Change. Reflecting for Change (R4C) has been designed to promote the use of self-reflection tools to support innovation and systemic change in schools. It proposes an innovation support framework (School Innovation Academy) and a roadmap to schools towards the meaningful uptake of sustainable innovation, with an emphasis on improved learning outcomes (Europe 2020). R4C highlights the potential of the SELFIE tool to act as a starting point by interconnecting ICT-based innovation with school openness for the development of an integrated plan to innovation. By using an established self-reflection process, 300 schools in 3 countries will be guided to set up a roadmap and an innovation strategy that makes the best use of ERASMUS + opportunities and policy related initiatives (national and international) to become innovative ecosystems. The project is bringing together key stakeholders who know how to generate systemic impact and to transfer the project’s outcomes and findings at policy level.
InNature. The InNature Project develops and implements in the classroom, a set of activities related to this approach and events, such as a fair about this thematic in schools using the Biomimicry as an approach
This approach defends that sustainable answers to many problems faced today were already developed by nature. This approach defines that many problems solutions can be found through the emulation of nature patterns.
Open Schools for Open Societies. Our schools should be incubators of exploration and invention. They should be accelerators of innovation. They should promote Open Schooling. School leaders should set a vision for creating learning experiences that provide the right tools and supports for all learners to thrive. Teachers should be collaborators in learning, seeking new knowledge and constantly acquiring new skills alongside their students. A holistic approach to innovation is needed. We need to facilitate the process with a provision of the necessary catalyst: This is the foreseen role of the Open Schools for Open Societies project, to describe and implement at scale a process that facilitates the transformation of schools to innovative ecosystems, acting as shared sites of science learning for which leaders, teachers, students and the local community share responsibility, over which they share authority, and from which they all benefit through the increase of their communities’ science capital and the development of responsible citizenship. In this framework OSOS supports a large number of European schools to implement Open Schooling approaches by a) developing a model that promote such a culture, b) offering guidelines and advice on issues such as staff development, redesigning time, and partnerships with relevant organisations (local industries, research organisations, parents associations and policy makers), and c) suggesting a range of possible implementation processes from small-scale prototypes through to setting up an “open school within a school” or even designing a new school while it is testing and assessing them in more than 1,000 school environments in 11 European countries. The themes of the project activities developed in participating schools focus on areas of science linked with the Grand Societal Challenges as shaped by the EC, are related to RRI and are linked with regional and local issues of interest.