InTIME21

InTIME21

Saturday 23 May 2015

SLOVENIA - PEER EDUCATION DAY 



On 22nd April (earth day) we had a peer teaching day and earth day on our school. Students were happy to lecture their schoolmates at different subjects (Biology, German, Physics, English...).  Everyone was able to choose his/her own theme. 
Maruša and I had a peer teaching lesson in our German class and we were talking about Earth Day. It was a nice and interesting experience. I have to say that everything is different when you stand in front of the board and you are trying to explain something to your friends, especially in language that we are not fluent in. In some moments it’s really hard too.  We were happy to see that our classmates were listening to us. Students who were present at this class said that it was interesting experience for them also, they said that classes were better, because students were able to talk about things that they like and introduce them to other students. Also, everyone was more relaxed and asked about things they didn’t know. I hope this day becomes a tradition, or maybe that classes like this happen more often, because it was definitely a really interesting experience.

Mojca Lukan

Meeting in IDRIJA, Slovenia

ROUND TABLE on competences





In our school, we organized a discussion using the technics of a round table as a part of the Erasmus+ meeting that we hosted at that time. This means teachers and young people from seven different countries – Slovenia, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Spain and Italy participated.  Our topic to discuss was what competences do young people need in their future work life? Therefore, for more actual information we invited representatives of some local companies like Kolektor, Hidria and Ydria Motors. We asked these representatives and the young people from every country to search for information in their towns that we’d be able to compare our experience with theirs. The questions we prepared for them were: do you think young people are taught these competences at school? Any suggestions how they could develop the competences they don’t have? Would you be willing to cooperate with schools to promote the development of these skills and competences? What aid do you offer to young people, in regard to future employment? In what areas do you offer employment to young people? Do you believe young people have a place in the town? What are your thoughts on the brain drain in your town?  What measures do you believe should be taken to combat the issue? 


Austria set out that it’s important to present your own opinion, think critical, have negotiating skills and to make compromises in critical situations. Their suggestions how to improve these skills were writing more essays on your own would prepare you to present certain topic and be critical about it, teachers should focus more on teaching us how to be critical and they also think that it would be good to cooperate more with some local companies.

Denmark presented us a video, in which they went around their town and interviewed some representatives of local companies.

In Finland, they found out that some of the important skills are flexibility, empathy, patience, good manners and the ability to solve problems. They think that the best solution would be to get a job and learn these skills there. In their town, local supermarkets offer 14 days of work practice.
Poland pointed out being responsible for your own actions, to be able to work in groups, to know how to use different technology (which is not such a problem in our generation), to be flexible to all kinds of different situations and people and of course to be happy with what you do. They said that school doesn’t teach us how to be adults but they are only putting facts, we’ll need on tests, in our head. In school, we actually learn something important and that is that we need to be responsible and give away school papers on time. And one thing we all agreed on in that learning languages is important.
Spain thinks that creativity, communication, being self-critic and languages are the most valued competences there. Their argument was that we do learn competences in school but only in theory and we don’t use them in practice, a suggestion was that we should have some exercises of real life situations which we would try and solve. Students there are also interested in cooperating with local companies.

In following conversations we discussed how to gain those competences with representatives of our local companies and they pointed out what competences they are looking for. The answers were quite similar and in conclusion flexibility, job satisfaction, motivation and passion are top four competences. They can be gained with hobbies, volunteer work and being involved in projects like Erasmus+. Our companies are also offering work practice, summer jobs, scholarships and Kolektor for example is also cooperating with factory in Germany. The main problem is that those jobs base on technical school background, which leads us to closure that finding job for a technician, is much easier in Idrija. 

We also agreed that ‘brain drain’ can be considered as a problem. At first young people who live in smaller towns go to bigger cities to study, get certain knowledge. Lots of them also go abroad to earn some experiences. Some of them go just because they like to travel, explore foreign countries and that’s okay. But in their hometowns they are often not able to find job and that’s what is keeping them away. They find employment in big town and they stay there. Now the big question is what we can or better said should do to prevent migrations of young intellects? In this case we should all be inspired by Denmark. As students said: ’’After education in big towns they move back to smaller ones. They also get paid for school so it’s easier to have small apartment in town.’’ And are they afraid not to get job? NO, because if they don’t get job they get support from the state so they can find one. So in Denmark if you are 18+ and you are educated you get some amount of money that helps you to find job.

After that topic we jumped to creativity, in our opinion one of most interesting parts of debate. For the start we asked ourselves what creativity actually is. We got different responses by students and teacher that creativity in their opinion is graffiti, painting, blogs, being yourself…And none of them was wrong. In words of Italian student CREATIVITY IS A WAY TO BE IMMORTAL and according to representative of Kolektor creativity is about finding new ways of solving problems, to improve existing solutions not just creating new products. We were also reminded that we often confuse creativity and technology. Everyone can make a movie with their phone but creativity takes time and in the end you don’t need expensive equipment to express yourself. Teachers also pointed out that we can’t be creative on command and here is the point where we, students agree with them. In our opinion school doesn’t give us enough space or enough freedom to express ourselves. Teachers give us thousands of definitions every day that we have to learn by heart and we don’t even try to understand half of them because we don’t discuss them, we don’t emphasize their meaning. As simple as that we opened a new topic that left lots of open questions so it may be excellent starting point of another round table.

For the end we saved question: ’’Are we active enough?’’ Well it depends, but for sure students and teachers who participate in InTime21 and similar projects are active and willing to change something. With collaborating in these kind of activities we don’t just gain competences, we also get prepared for future life and obtain certain knowledge that school can’t give us. With these words in mind we are all anticipating the next meeting in Spain. 
Špela Bratuš & Carolina Petrič





Meeting in IDRIJA, Slovenia

Exchanging good practice - Socratic seminar


On the second day of our conference the teaching staff attempted to present to us the new, more innovative and engaging methods of teaching that have the potential to increase the participation of students during the classes themselves as this specific method of teaching involved a debate.
Listening to the instructions

However, there is a slight twist in the “plot” of this debate, while the usual debates have a narrator who asks question and leads the conversation towards the conclusion this debate didn’t have a “leader” of the conversation. In the beginning the teacher first lied down some ground rules for the debate which were quite basic such as: “no insulting” and “no talking when others speak” but on the other hand there was one rule which got my attention the most: the students cannot raise their hands to get their right to speak and without any leadership that had the potential to cause some trouble in the conversation.

Afterwards we were all given a short poem and were asked to read it. Although I felt quite confident that I understood the poem myself, I wanted to make sure that others did as well and asked if anyone of my fellow students would mind if we read the poem out loud. That turned out into a good idea and with every participant in the conversation aware of the topic we are discussing, we started the debate.

Naturally, there was some confusion at the beginning and the conversation jumped between different points, none of which were properly discussed. But towards the end each one of us got the feeling of our own strengths and weaknesses in this debate and the analyze of the poem went quite well.

In the end the teacher gave each one of us feedbacks on how we could improve ourselves and in my opinion that is the best part of this exercise as the students in the end get the feedback they need to improve themselves in the future.


To conclude, I believe that in the opinion of most participants the exercise turned out quite successful but without proper guidance any debate might stray off its original purpose and needs at least a bit of control from the side of the teacher.
Aljaž Seljak