eTwinning Learning Events

I think you've already heard of eTwinning Learning Events (LE). If you haven't yet, well, you definitely should.

That's a great opportunity eTwinning offers for free to us teachers: an expert introducing you to different subjects, while interacting with other eTwinners. So you get the whole lot of benefits: expert's guidance + fellow eTwinners' experience and opinions.

During the last couple of year, I've had the opportunity to attend different LE on various subjects, sometimes dealing with my everyday teaching, sometimes just out of curiousity  (my bravest attempt being that at nanotechnology). All of them enriched my teaching and my feeling of being part of a larger community.

Of course, since LEs usually cover a short period of time, it's difficult to experience there a real feeling of the eTwinning community: yet, you feel part of a group who share your same eagerness - get to know more, improve your teaching, move to the next level your competences in team working... or just get to know more about a specific subject (ICT, languages, proget-planning, etc).

In October, I attended the "Children’s Rights" LE, presented by Miriam Schembri. That's how Miriam introduced it to us:

"During this event we will be looking at children’s rights from an educator’s perspective and see how we can use these rights as guidelines in our daily school life to give dignity to children. We will explore how they will affect classroom practice and how to make children conscious of their rights and responsibilities."

At the moment, I'm dealing with a difficult situation in my school, having to face lots of behaviuor issues (sometimes even rage issues) in my pupils. I believe this is connected with a larger-scale social unrest in our communities, yet teachers have to deal with it. That's why this LE provided me with the right kind of reflection, at the right moment. And the opportunity to rely on the opinions of fellow teachers from all over Europe, often sharing my same problems and concerns, was more than welcome.

The LE was structured in 5 steps, with a reflection at the end of each one:

1 - The relationship between needs and rights.

2 - Rights and Responsibilities

3 - Teaching in a rights respecting class

4 - Participation rights for children

5 - Giving children a voice

It ended up being a journey in my beliefs, doubts and fears. But also a first step towards a possible solution (at the very least, an attempt to one).

As well as her experience and know-how, Miriam shared with us some useful documents. I believe they can be of interest for a larger number of teachers, so I'm sharing them with you, as usual, in the public section of THE NEXT GENERATION Twinspace (under "useful materials"). I hope you'll find them as useful as I did. (so thank you Miriam!)

By the way, there are lots of new documents in the TNG TwinSpace, so do have a look and see if there's anything for you.

Looking forward to reading your impressions... and to seeing you at the next LE !

Laura