School Transformation Lab – All students got talent is a 3-year Erasmus Plus project (September 2017 – August 2020) aiming at transforming and innovating didactic models at school.The project idea came from the 15-year experience of John Rizzo, known in Belgium as a “school transformer” and from a common need felt by many European teachers to “transform their schools” and make them more responding to the current society. Most school system experts agree about the growing gap between our (traditional) schools and society: the employability needs and citizenship needs. Are most existing schools equipping our kids to drive this civilization metamorphosis?Most 20th century schools are structured to train students to follow hierarchical orders and guidance on performing repetitive tasks, often alone, sometimes in competition with other students. 21st-century schools should rather focus and initiate a systemic transition enabling more: • entrepreneurship, • peer learning, • equity and inclusion, • digital competences, • multilingualism, while improving the sustainability (reducing costs) of the schools. Being a teacher in these two kinds of schools are two different jobs. Moving from one to another within the same generation is a highly needed and highly challenging process.Starting from these considerations, 4 partners, an innovation model school from Belgium, a special education secondary school from Greece, a secondary school from Norway and teacher trainer organization from Italy, worked together to propose and to create an innovative School Transformation Path including • an effective transformation process, • courses materials for training teachers, • a soft skills curriculum for pupils, • an impact assessment tool.The main objectives of the project are the consequent results are:- Strengthen the profiles of the teaching profession: the only way to transform a school is to make teachers change their behaviour. The first output (01) is, therefore, a process to help them achieve this change The second output (O2) is a curriculum for training the teachers, whilst the third output (O3) is a soft skills curriculum for pupils that will reflect on teacher’s soft skills;- Achievement of relevant and high-quality skills and competences: once a school is transformed, fast students do not have to wait for the teacher or the rest of the class anymore. They learn faster than more. Slow students too have to learn tasks in their proximal development zone: challenging but achievable. They really close the gap on their missing prerequisite skills and build much stronger foundations against discouragement and school drop out. Slow students also benefit more teacher time since fast students need lighter support.- Open and innovative practices in the digital area: in a transformed school, the teacher drastically reduces the number of collective explanations he/she gives. The heart of the transformation is to make the student autonomous in their learning. Internet is not anymore a competitor to the teacher’s knowledge but an ally to sustain that autonomy.The project attracted a number of stakeholders (within and outside the partner organizations) to understand the specific issues of traditional teaching methods towards new and personalised learning methodologies affecting EU schools, teaching methods, target group’s needs (teachers and students). Teachers, educators and trainers now have greater understanding and responsiveness to teaching difficulties, but also the linguistic and cultural diversity of partners, students, parents with which we got into contact during the project have been greatly improved. Students, benefit from more talented and committed teachers. All materials (and much more) produced are available on the School Transformation website: https://schooltransformationlab.eu/

Having textbooks adapted to differentiation is the first key to allow teachers to change posture and support their class in a differentiated way. It is not active pedagogy as usually presented. From our experience of accompanying schools, we know that an ordinary school with simultaneous teaching wants to keep an “ordinary school” character and is not ready to make the students work most of the time in groups on transdisciplinary projects, which we do not offer.The two crucial factors in transforming an ordinary school are:- support the teacher's posture change in class (coaching),- offer ready-to-use course material allowing autonomy and differentiation.Point 1, teacher training and transformation process, was successfully addressed in the Erasmus + SchoolTransformationLab.eu project which ends in August 2020 with other partners.Point 2 is the “exercises” part of the course material, ie school booklets for students. This is what we propose to create and make available to the greatest number via this Erasmus project and will concern the main subjects of students from 8 to 14 years old: French, mathematics, science, geography and history.This proposal excites all the teachers we support. Except ... there is no ready-to-use textbook to work in this way, which slows down the transformation of schools and the implementation of differentiated pedagogies.Therefore, the partnership composed of a school and a center for educational innovation (Ecole du Dialogue), a university (Université Paul-Valéry de Montpellier), a training association (Allagi) and the aim of a platform for teachers (Teaching.be) is to develop ready-to-use exercise material allowing the change of posture of the teacher in the class and adaptation to the level and needs of all students.

This two-year project, which was led by an outstanding UK Primary School, addressed the problem of integrating migrant children in the Primary sector into their local communities. It built a partnership of six organisations from five countries, who brought complementary expertise and experience in dealing with issues relating to the integration of migrants, citizenship education and Primary practice. The focus of this Strategic Partnership was to innovate through cooperative practice with the aim of developing a package of Values Education at a European level in order to: • foster social inclusion, mutual understanding and respect among young people and communities • accelerate the integration of children of newly arrived migrants into the learning environment • minimize the risk of disengagement, marginalisation and even violent radicalisation. • address the objectives of the Paris Declaration on promoting citizenship and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination through education • develop networking to increase transnational working and sharing of ideas. The starting point was a study visit for to analyse best practice of the UK schools and develop a scheme of work, a training package and set of resources which were trialled in five countries before being made freely available across the EU. The training and methodology was trialled in 2 schools in the UK, 3 in Italy, 3 in Belgium, 3 in Greece and a Youth organisation in Germany. The partners and schools involved represented particularly vulnerable regions, such as the Mediterranean, or challenging urban quarters. The outputs of the project are: • An online platform hosting the project website, downloadable resources and case studies • A set of training modules and case studies and an online guide to support the training • An impact report incorporating policy recommendations • A set of dissemination materials and seminars in 5 countries • A final international conference which promoted the curriculum, training resources and impact report Although the lingua franca was English, resources have been developed in Greek, Italian, French and German.