International > Comenius Project
1. A brief outline
We are currently at the end of the first year of a Comenius funded International project. We have two partners, Lycee Francois Xavier in Besançon, France and Zespol Skol is Bielsko-Biala, Poland. The purpose of the project is to look at staff student relations in each institution and to see what the similarities and differences are. From here it is hoped to pilot improvements and eventually to draw conclusions. Staff and students work together between the institutions sharing ideas and experiences. The following pages give an idea of activity over the last year.
2. A project outline and results
The project began with a meeting in Poland in November 2005 to decide how to progress the project. This has been written up by Liam Wadsworth in section 3.
The focus of the project from September to December in each country and institution was to carry out questionnaires amongst staff and students regarding their perceptions and opinions about how they rated a number of key elements of college life. There included, for the students:
- rights and responsibilities
- experiences with personal tutors
- reasons for choosing the institution
- student to student and staff to student relations
- personal safety
- enjoyment at college
- social inclusion
For the staff, questions focussed on:
- relationships between colleagues
- social inclusion
- co-operation between staff
- job satisfaction
- professional duties
All parties met in Huddersfield in January to collate the results and make recommendations for the remainder of the year. Each institution had picked up an individual element which they hoped to pursue as further research. In the case of Poland and France, it was to look at the possibility of introducing a student contract like that in Huddersfield which sets out what the students and institution should provide.
In Huddersfield the issue of poor uptake for enhancement activities was to be our focus.
All parties agreed to not use questionnaires for this further research but to use much smaller ‘focus group’ discussions where students could be more open about their opinions.
In June, the parties met again in France to discuss the results of their projects and to set goals for the forthcoming year. The further research had been very fruitful.
The main results were to set objectives for the second year of the project by piloting some improvements and these are as follows:
It was therefore decided at the meeting to pilot ideas for a staff induction and student induction within the first month of the new school year. Activities will be video taped if possible as evidence. We will also need to attempt to ‘measure’ the outcome, possibly by questionnaire or informal discussion. This may be subjective but it is meant to give an initial idea if it is an activity to widen to the whole school in year 3.
- Staff Induction
To have a Welcome event such as a BBQ, lunch or other social event to integrate new staff, part time staff and individual departments.
To have a team building activity to get people to work together.
- Student induction (as devised by the project students)
To have a series of activities in individual classes to encourage young people to integrate with each other and their class teacher.
In addition there are two other possibilities:
- Explore further the idea of ‘respect’ and come up with a definition for specific classes or the whole school/college.
- Each class decides on a set of class rules and what student sanctions they would have if the rules are broken. This supports the idea of respect and in a wider sense society/belonging/law and order which could also be used as citizenship activities.
