COMENIUS SCHOOL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

Pantarijn is one of the schools who participates in a school development project financed by the European Fund.

A school development project takes three years. This project can be projectwork in schools, projectmeetings, teacher exchanges and student exchanges for the benefit of the renewal of educational implementations in schools.

This means:
- Pantarijn is currently cooperating with schools from Denmark, Finland, Germany and Greece.
- We want to arrange our educational system in such a way, that students like to learn and become more motivated
- We want to do this step by step

• The first year we want to try lessons with multiple intelligences
• The second year we want to try lessons with different learning styles, sometimes combined with multiple intelligences
• The third year we want to try lessons with cooperative learning, maybe in combination with learning styles and/or multiple intelligences

Meetings take place three times a year. We take turns being the host country. We also bring at least two students with us. We use these meetings to:

• have discussions about the theoretical part of the lessons
• show lessons/projects to each other and compare experiences
• exchange experiences in such a way that it provides us to structurally implement the changes in school

These meetings also serve another purpose; we use it to become familiar with the host country's educational system and to learn more about the culture of the host country.

YEAR 1

In this year we made projects and lessons that are based op Gardner's theory. This theory states that people have 8 intelligences:

• verbal linguistic
• logical mathematical
• visual spatial
• musical
• bodily kinesthetic
• intrapersonal
• interpersonal naturalistic

Gardner states that every person has multiple intelligences. Stimulating a student on his or her strongest intelligences, will result in better learning-effects. Weaker intelligences can be enhanced.

For a young student it is very important that these areas are stimulated. We try to do this in different ways:
- we base our didactic methods on all the intelligences

• with the possibility to choose
• without the possibility to choose

- have students do final assignments based on the intelligences
- form collaborations for the same intelligence with:

• preference for the samen intelligence
• as many different intelligences in one group as possible

Here are some examples in Dutch:

YEAR 2 

This year we have dealt with different learning styles:  

We chose two different theories of learning styles: 

1. Dunn and Dunn
2. Kolb

Dunn and Dunn's theory is based on the importances of the learning circumstances; the circumstances in which a child learns, should be optimal.With circumstances we mean; the temperature, optimal light, a hard or a soft chair, etc. But also things like whether a child prefers to learn alone, in pairs or in a group. The Danish group had a test for this. We translated this into Dutch.

You can find the Dutch test here.

For our school it's quite hard to work with this specific learning style theory; our pupils have a different teacher each period, a classroom is used by many different classes, there is nothing to change about the lights and the chairs and tables are standard issue.

This is unlike countries like Denmark and Finland; the pupils are in the same school until they are about fifteen years old and their mentor teach them for at least about half their periods. These pupils also have their own classroom; they only leave this room when they have PE, arts and crafts, science and music.
In this way the Dunn & Duun theory can work; you can use different lights, put some sofas and pillows in the classroom, etc. 

In order to still do something with this theory, we decided to organise a meeting for parents in which we explain the theory and have parents fill in the test. In this way, parents can fill in the test with their child(ren) and use the outcome; they can then adjust the study area of thei child(ren) accordingly.

Kolb's theory consists briefly of this: Kolb feels it's important that while you stuidy you follow a certain cycle:

• concrete experience
• reflective observation
• abstract conceptualization
• active experimentation

When you study, you usually have a preference to start at a certain stage. You can take a test for this (when you Google, you can find different ones). It's fine to start at a certain stage, as long as you go through all the other stages of  the cycle as well. In short; a learning style is a preference for a stage in the learning cycle. A teacher also has a preference; one needs to pay attention to this while guiding the pupil in going through the entire cycle.

Pantarijn has investigated in what we can do with Kolb's learning style. During the language lessons we give the pupils assignments in which they work in groups on a presentation.They also have to use a logbook with this. By using this logbook the teacher can adjust the pupil's 'learning'. We have adapted this logbook according to Kolb's theory.

We have also investigated the possibility of combining both Gardner's and Kolb's theory in our lessons. Here is a good example of how we combined this:

Multiple Intelligence and Kolb theory put into practice by class 1HV4 (aged 12,13)
Groups consisting of 3/4 pupils chose 6 different tasks/assignments.
Each group then decided to pick 3 assignments to work out, individually or together.
All the assignments (60 in total) were made by 3rd grade pupils such as:

* translate a Dutch song into English
* draw a coloured map of the Netherlands and put all environmental aspects in it.
* make a rap about school and so on

All assignments were related to MI meaning that every pupil was able to pick one he/she really liked to work on.

By using a log each group was guided through the circle of Kolb: starting at one point and work ones way through it in a given/guided order. By following this log step by step the entire circle of Kolb was covered by each individual pupil.

The final result of this project was really interesting because each child had produced a poster presentation whivh contained one MI or a combination of some. The children liked working on this assignment which we could see during the lesons and of course in the end when all these wonderfull posters were finished.

Liesbeth van der Werf and class 1HV4

YEAR 3

In this year (schoolyear 2008-2009) we will investigate the possibilities of cooperative learning.