How is this going to go?

You know what the ESSR project is, and you know who the partners are. There´s still a lot for us to share, though, and the top priority right now is telling you how this is actually going to work. We have a plan for how the project will unfold over the next two years, and we hope that it will be useful for you as you put together your own projects.

We kicked things off with a meeting in Prague for all of the partners, just so that we could all get on the same page about our goals and the pedagogical principles that we´re coming from (more on those in another blog post!). While most of the work will be done separately, we believe that meeting regularly throughout the project is important for keeping everyone engaged and working at the same pace.

Each partner brought an piece of material that they believed might be suitable for the lesson plans that we´re putting together to the first meeting, and then all of the partners discussed and critiqued the various selections. The next meeting between partners will happen in May in Košice, Slovakia, and everyone will bring a selection of materials that they believe would be suitable for a lesson plan, based on the discussion from the previous meeting. After that, they will all assemble an actual lesson plan for the first round of piloting.

Whenever you´re developing educational materials, piloting with students and teachers is a key part of the process. The feedback you get from actually putting the material to use is invaluable, and it will often surprise you. No matter how long you´ve been doing this, you can´t always guess how students will react or how teachers will decide to use the material. We will thus be holding two rounds of piloting, the first in the fall of 2018 and the second in the spring of 2019, where each partner´s lesson plan will be piloted in all of the participating partner countries (that is, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria). They´ll all be translated into the partner languages for piloting, so language barriers will not get in the way of comprehension. After each round of piloting, the partners will analyze the feedback together, and then all edit their lesson plans accordingly.

After the second round of piloting The final stage of editing will take place, with the goal of creating a lesson plan from each country that will be usable for teachers and students internationally. Then, the partners will begin promoting the material with a series of public events in all of the countries. After all, what good is a set of cutting-edge educational material if no one knows about it? We´ll wrap everything up at the beginning of 2019, but the promotional work won´t stop and who knows, there might be another project that comes next.