International development plan for Hammarskolan 2015-2017 The activities are linked to: The educational goals of the EU year 2020: The percentage of under-achieving 15-years-old in reading, mathematics and natural science should be below 15%. 90% of all young people should complete their secondary education. Goals of Erasmus+ Strengthen the international dimension. Improve language teaching and language learning. Contribute to a higher quality and more internationalisation within the educational system. The goals of Sweden: Prevent early school-leaving. Strengthen basic skills The goals of Hammarskolan: We want to reach higher effectiveness and promote school attainment in all subjects and in this way prevent early school leaving. We want to increase the social protection as well as the chance of working effictively for all students in the classroom. Inclusion is a key word. We want to increase the international cooperation and work with different schools in Europe. Our goal is to strengthen our language teaching by this cooperation. Needs: Surahammar is a small mill town in the county of Västmanland. The community of Surahammar has aproximately 10000 inhabitants. The population has, until recently, been rather homogenous , with inhabitants of Swedish or Finnish origin. In recent years the population has become more and more heterogenous, because of all refugees. In many homes the parents are not used to studies and it can be hard to motivate our students to study at home. We need to observe schools that have succeeded in motivating their students to reach high results in spite the lack of support from the parents. We also want to influence our students’ attitudes, so that it will be something positive to study and reach high results. The PISA results in Sweden are far below average and we would like to visit schools in countries that have succeeded far better than we have. In this way we would like to learn from those countries and in the long run be able to avoid that students stay at home in stead of going to school . We think that this could prevent early school-leaving. We also need to learn how to motivate our students to study languages and how they can succeed in their language studies. Our language teachers need contacts in the countries where they speak the languages that we teach, to be able to give our students the possibility to communicate for real. Furthermore our language teachers need to develop their own languages to be able to stay in touch with new influences in the languages that they teach. Aims Our aims are to create a safe and friendly atmosphere for studies, where it would be permitted to succeed at school. We would like to include all the students in the classroom and thereby reach higher results in all subjects. We would also like to reach higher results in foreign languages, through the education of our language teachers. Furthermore we want to broathen our teachers’ and our students’ horizons by enlightening them about daily life in schools in other countries. Another aim is to start an ongoing cooperation with a number of schools in Europe, to be able to see how they work with these matters in other countries in Europe. Results and effects: Better results in all subjects A safe and friendly atmosphere for studying, where all students are included. Better results in foreign langauges. Get all students to school and prevent early school-leaving. A better understanding for the world around us. A continous cooperation with schools in Europe. A bigger European dimension in teaching, get Europe into the classroom. Activities 2015-2017 Job-shadowing: 3 special needs teachers will study inclusion and how to create a quiet and friendly atmoshere in the classroom, in Finland, Poland and Germany. A maths/natural science teacher will study methods of the Maths teaching in the Netherlands. A Swedish/social studies teacher will study how to reach high reading comprehension, in Finland. Three language teachers will study how to teach languages in France, Germany and England. Our English teachers will take part in a course in Great Britain: “ Language, Life and Culture in the UK today” Dissimination: Our staff will update our progress on our internal website Schoolsoft, where they will write about their experiences so that the rest of the staff, our students and the students’ parents can be informed about their accomplishments. The teachers who have taken part in job-shadowing will talk about their observations during our staff meetings, so that everybody can benefit from their experiences and so that we can make a plan for the future for our school. Through meetings between teachers for different ages, the experiences will be shared. The education of the language teachers will inspire the students to continue their language studies and to get longterm contacts in the countries where the languages they study are spoken. Our blog will show our students' progression