Empower:Me - Exchanging Good Practices and Extending Method Pools in European Special Schools to Strengthen Self-Confidence of Students with Learning Disabilities

We wanted to facilitate a fruitful exchange of methods and experiences between teachers and disseminators working in or with special needs schools. There were 9 meetings total planned (objective 1...

We wanted to facilitate a fruitful exchange of methods and experiences between teachers and disseminators working in or with special needs schools. There were 9 meetings total planned (objective 1). At first, the participants presented their good practices and contributed to building a method pool (objective 2), many of them relying on digital tools and broadening digital competencies (objective 3). After testing out the methods, sharing experiences and possible adjustments and documenting everything (objective 4), the most popular methods were written down with any important additional information for the creation of a brochure to be distributed to other teachers, disseminators and social workers as well (objective 5). We wanted to expand every participant's knowledge through sharing diverse experiences and be able to apply the best fitting methods in schools. We hope to gradually implement these practices to support students’ self-confidence long-term in everyday school life and give teachers a helping hand through our digitally accessible brochure. Henceforth, it becomes a priority to check in with the students and helps them to develop a healthy sense of self and ambitions for their future.

We implemented all of the planned activities in our project, most crucial of them were the three in-person meetings. For organizational reasons, we switched two of the meetings, which also gave us the opportunity to work on our brochure in person. For our second activity we met in Kosice, Slovakia and our last activity was our meeting and teacher's conference in Ankara, Turkey. Except for this change, we were able to carry out every activity as planned. This means: We firstly met for a method exchange in Maribor in January. Afterwards, our cooperative counselling sessions took place every few weeks, where each partner presented their experiences with their chosen methods and got feedback from the rest of the group. The partners who piloted the methods were all the participating teachers and the organizations working with schools through their contacted teachers - every partner except for BÜRO BLAU and Drustvo Jasa. In May, we met in Kosice to work on the brochure with the most popular methods and visit our partner school. Over the summer months, the brochure was finalized and every month one online lecture by external contributors took place, where a topic of the partner's choosing was discussed. Lastly, we met in Ankara.

The concrete output of our project is a brochure in four languages (English, German, Slovakian, Turkish), containing the most popular methods we tested. It includes instructions with possible variations, plus tips and tricks as well as pictures and information on all the participating organizations and schools. The brochure was already shared in a teacher's meeting in Ankara with other special needs teachers, who were not part of our project. There, the brochure was distributed in the Turkish language, which made it accessible for those who are not firm in English. Thus, besides the digitally accessible and (in a limited amount) printed copies of the final brochure, one result is the teacher's and social workers' gain of knowledge. As well as this, the participants networked with each other, found similarities in their ways of work as well as inspiration for new approaches. Plus, two of the organizations even carried out a student exchange in the meantime. The teachers also reported that the methods they tested had a positive impact on their students, as they could i.e. voice their strengths weeks or months later. Furthermore, we documented every step of the project with protocols, attendance lists and photos.