COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AS A METHOD OF EDUCATING INDIVIDUALS AND CONNECTING CULTURES According to EU education cooperation strategy and the new national education secondary school curricula collaborative lerning, participation and students' well being have to be taken into account in teaching. Creativity, innovation, inter-cultural dialogue and social togetherness must be stressed in education. Education has to prepare students for active citizenship as well as practise their skills for labour market and entrepreneurship. One aim of the project is also to decrease the number of school leavers. The aims listed above will be reached best by adding collaborative learning and teamwork to the Finnish teacher-centered secondary school education. The aim of this project is to make collaborative learning and teamwork a natural part of both teaching and learning. Experience and training will be acquired from European partner schools and pedagogical courses. It is important to educate the young to act in multilingual and multicultural groups in the intergrated Europe since that is what their everyday work will be like in the future. In addition to social skills this means also versatile knowledge of languages and customs as well as awareness of special features of their own culture. Collaborative learning educates an individual, strenghtens the sense of togetherness and connects cultures. To be able to give to our students many-sided information on European peoples' customs, we have to familiarize ourselves with them by travelling to as many different countries as possible. Twelve (12) teachers from our school will attend training courses, job shadowing and teaching assignment activities in different parts of Europe in 2014-2016. The teachers involved in the project teach arts and drama, mathematics, music, history, psychologie, religion, biology, mother tongue and foreign languages. Job shadowing and teaching assignments will be carried out in our long-term partner schools throughout Europe. The project will be participated by ten (10) womwn and two (2) men, all of them aged 30-60. After the project teaching in our school will comprise collaborative learning methods and varying teaching methods more than now, the teachers' conception of different ways of teaching and learning will have expanded, the teacher will also have become an instructor on learning instead of a teacher. Since the students will be more responsible for learning, teachers will have less sense of rush which will improve both students' and teachers' well-being. After the project the students' social skills as well as knowledge of skills recuiered for working in a multicultural group will have improved. All this improves students' skills for labour market and entrepreneurship. After the project the students will feel more comfortable at school thanks to increased use of creativity, sense of togetherness, as well as participation, which will decrease both loneliness and the number of dropouts. Cooperation with our European partner schools will continue even more actively concerning both teachers and students.