What is the All-In Teacher Kit?
The All-In Teacher Kit is the 2nd Intellectual Output of “All-Inclusive School” Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnership project, that aims at developing a kit of didactic tools intended to facilitate teachers and educators working with learners with mild cognitive disabilities.
The All-In Teacher Kit is a practical guide of a selected set of cooperative and innovative teaching strategies and methods with related tools to support the work of the inclusive teacher.
The All-In Teacher Kit is therefore a support tool for teachers to introduce and/or to help improve their inclusive teaching methods. It is a repository of practices developed around methods, approaches and organizational styles of teaching and learning. The “All-Inclusive School” project aims at providing European teachers and educators with a ready-to-use tool kit with different methods for
implementing inclusive education in their classrooms.
The structure of the kit reflects the different categories of the targeted research that was conducted at an earlier stage of the project, namely for the 1 st Intellectual Output ‘All-In Identikit’ (IO1). One of the aims of Intellectual Output I was to map the “skills, competencies and practices based on the ‘Inclusive Teacher Profile’ (EASNIE, 2012)”.
Who is All-In Teacher Kit for?
The “All-Inclusive School” project aims at promoting school inclusion of 12 to 19 year old European learners with “mild intellectual disability” (DSM-5). The direct target group of this output includes teachers and educators of the above mentioned category of learners (indirect target group). Hence, the All-In Teacher Kit is intended to be used as a resourceful guide to support teachers and professionals in schools and to enhance the learning environment through shifting towards a more inclusive education in its broader sense .
Furthermore, this Kit is available for professionals in the field of education such as curriculum designers, policy makers and ministerial advisers. It can provide evidence of the state-of-the-art in terms of inclusive education practices.
What is included in the All-In Teacher Kit?
The Kit is divided into three sections:
SECTION ONE: Organisation of Learning
SECTION TWO: Assessment of learning to learn skills
SECTION THREE: Social Book Creator
Section one:
Goals & Methods |
Organisation of Learning
Eighteen methods are described on how teachers and educators can organise learning to be more inclusive. The term “organisation” in this kit includes all the actions, decisions and general practices – mostly performed by teachers – that have an impact on the spatial, social-relational and temporal aspects of teaching and learning.
Organisation implies awareness of the consequences these aspects have on learners. For this, they are regarded as “methods” and not mere situations.
The methods accounted for in this Kit respond to six different goals identified in IO1 All-In Identikit.
For each method a minimum of one example of activity has been chosen from the working experiences of teachers from the five EU countries involved in the project 1 . The examples function both as best practices for the method and for the goal they refer to, as well as replicable, ready-to-use inclusive teaching practices.
The methods and the related examples come from the teachers who have answered the questionnaire used for shaping the All-In Identikit.
“Teachers who not just tolerate but actively subscribe to the integration of compulsory school pupils must reject traditional systems of marking.”
“…how are we to establish a just and fair average, by which individual performance is measured, if the individuality of the pupils is used as a basis for teaching activities.
Different settings of learning necessitate a wide repertory of methods and individualised learning objectives call for noncomparative forms of assessment.”
Section two::
Assessment of Learning to learn skills
It is a collection of methods and tools that are considered as good inclusive assessment approaches.
For the past three decades school systems in Europe have been searching for assessment methods
that would be applicable in heterogeneous classes and individual tutoring.
The EU’s 2018 Recommendations on Key competencies for lifelong learning 2 identifies the personal, social and learning to learn competence as “the ability to reflect upon oneself, effectively manage time and information, work with others in a constructive way, remain resilient and manage one’s own learning and career.”
In addition, the essential knowledge, skills and attitudes related to this competence have been addressed: “Skills include the ability to identify one’s capacities, focus, deal with complexity, critically reflect and make decisions. This includes the ability to learn and work both collaboratively and autonomously and to organise and persevere with one’s learning, evaluate and share it, seek support when appropriate and effectively manage one’s career and social interactions.
Individuals should be resilient and able to cope with uncertainty and stress. They should be able to communicate constructively in different environments, collaborate in teams and negotiate. This includes showing tolerance, expressing and understanding different viewpoints, as well as the ability to create confidence and feel empathy.”
The answers of the teachers who do assess and help develop the ‘learning to learn skills’ of their
learners can be categorized under 20 learning to learn skills assessments’ methods, which are fully described in this section. 5 practical examples of these methods are then addressed. These tools of best practices are intended to be replicated and further developed by teachers in their own classes.
They are described as ready-to-use in this kit.
Section three:
Social Book Creator
The last section is dedicated to Social Books Creator (SBC), which is the third intellectual output thought and designed within ALL-INCLUSIVE SCHOOL project.
As the first two outputs, All-In Identikit (IO1) and All-In Teacher Kit (IO2), All-In Social Book Creator (IO3) shares the aim of being a supportive tool for the activities that European teachers conduct and develop in their classroom, with their learners.
Social Books Creator is a web app that allows users to create Social Books, i.e. collaborative digital resources released under a Creative Commons license and produced in a class by the collaboration among learners and teachers; both become authors of their knowledge.
The section contains the description of three possible individual and collaborative uses of SBC:
Activity 1, Activity 2 and Activity 3.
These examples do not exhaust the range of uses that the web app offers, but they have to be considered as prompts and tips for an initial approach to a new tool, confirming the operational nature of All-In Teacher Kit.
It is recommended to read all the options and then make a decision on which to handle because some sequences of operations are in common or can be implemented with every activity.