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Description
The project was created as a tool of long-term cooperation between the Czech and Norwegian secondary schools. Both schools educate special needs students. The Czech school is a special secondary school attended by students with disabilities. The major part of students suffer from physical handicap often combined with other kinds of handicap such a disorder of autistic spectrum, visual impairment, hearing impairment or mental handicap. Although Norwegian educational system differs, there are special classes within a common secondary school attended by students with different kinds of disabilities in Norwegian school. Both schools would like to enrich their special teaching methods, methodology of after school education and approaches by observing their foreign colleagues working in their school. We are planning four meetings, two in the Czech Republic and two in Norway, each of them will be attended by four special needs educators from the partner school. The project is intended to be the first stage of long-term cooperation; we are planning to continue this cooperation with student mobilities and involving real companies focused on employment of people with disability.
Summary of project results
We as the school which works with people with many types of handicaps needed to experience how the Norwegian school deals with the students with handicap and we wanted to exchange our special educational methods and approaches. During the project period 8 employees of the Czech school visited Norwegian school and 8 people from Norwegian school visited our school. We learned from each other and got some new ideas for doing our work even better. The project was really important for both our schools because we realized not even the ways to improve our work but also, we found our strength and fields which we can share and be proud of. Norwegian colleagues admired our systematic work with handicapped students and they took a lot of photographs of our teaching aids and they decided to use the same way for collecting students’ materials – for example they were so excited by our special saving spiral notebooks that they decided to start them using immediately after their visit at our school. On the other hand, we realized that Norwegian pupils spend much more time learning in the countryside (without regard to the weather) through practical things such a game or preparing food on the fire or doing something practical and useful. Working on the project even strengthened relationship in our Czech team and we discovered our strengths.
Summary of bilateral results
The project was created because we wanted to compare the educational methods of teaching the students with special needs with another school. We did observe the work of each other and we learned from it since there are rather big differences. We tried to focus on the things which are being done more efficiently by our partner school and they concentrated on our strengths. It was so useful for both our schools. We are even trying to implement those new procedures into our teaching. It was the first experience with European projects for our Norwegian partner, so we needed to talk and communicate a lot. We tried to solve every problem and misunderstanding which should arise and finally we were able to understand each other and enjoy both our stays in our schools. We would like to cooperate with each other in the future although we haven’t agreed on the form of cooperation yet.