 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this webinar offered by the European School Education Platform, the European Commission's platform for school education in Europe. My name is Marta and I will be your host for today. The focus for today is school partnerships, open schools for open societies, a challenging and effective path. But before giving the floor to our guest speaker Petra van Harren, director of the European School Head Association, it's a great pleasure to introduce and give the floor to Ulrike Astoros, who will give a very special introduction for us today. Ulrike, welcome, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you, Marta. So welcome to this webinar. I'm really pleased to have today, together here in this room, teachers, school leaders, education policy makers and those all interested in education policy. My name is Ulrike. I'm working at the European Commission on School Education Policy. And why did we actually put this webinar on the agenda? Why do we speak about school partnerships? What I wanted to give you is a bit of an understanding of how does this link to the broader policy debates or policy efforts that we have at the European Union level. You can see my slides, I assume. Yeah, we can see them. Perfect. So school community partnerships are actually part of our efforts on blended learning for inclusion. And how do we define blended learning? Blended learning is not only what is commonly understood as blending online, digital and non-digital tools, but it is also blending different learning environments, school sites, cultural centers, outdoors, etc. Of course, using these different approaches to the learning path has probably always been part of what U.S. teachers have been doing. You have been taking out your students to the local library. But the COVID times have really shed light on this approach to blending different learning styles, different learning pathways on new forms of blending. They have come into our picture, especially using different digital tools, blending school site and distance learning. And understanding which of these blends are actually the most effective and for which types of learners is in the focus of our renewed efforts at the European Union level. And this has gotten so much into the focus of policymakers that the education ministers in 2021 decided to adopt a council recommendation on this subject. It's because they and us, we believe that it's making education systems more resilient and prepared for all future developments if teachers can take more than one approach to the learning path. We also see and, yeah, we believe that it's also beneficial from a pedagogical point of view. Because blended learning makes school teaching more inclusive. It can be more flexible to a wide range of wide different learners' needs. It can enhance the competence development of young pupils. It can, for example, a school that promotes collaboration with the local community actually can encourage this shared sense of responsibility for the development of young people. And this, in turn, also can make it, again, more interesting and motivate young learners to have education that is relevant to their everyday life. How do we promote blended learning at EU level? Well, all through the last year, we have brought together representatives of ministries of education in our working group on schools. It is part of our strategic cooperation with EU countries. It's part of our work to work towards a European education area. And in this working group, we had several meetings, seminars. We looked at good practices and we came up with key messages, key messages for policymakers and for school leaders. And I would ask my colleagues kindly to post in the chat the link to the final report of this working group's work. It's accompanied by a short fact sheet. So if you want to read into the key messages, get inspired by examples, please have a look afterwards. You see some of the key messages on this slide. So for example, policymakers can actually help schools to innovate by giving them the flexibility and the resources. School leaders can also encourage a shared leadership in their schools and really bring in more resources from the local community. And I asked two of our working group members to give us a little recording of their insights, how they actually put this into practice in Estonia and Croatia. And I wanted to share this with you. It's a two minute video. Let's see if you can hear it. School leaders can support blended learning for inclusion by allowing sufficient autonomy for all teachers so that creativity could flourish. The teachers should be seen as professionals who know what is best for their pupils and how the learning process could be made more meaningful for them. Of course, legal framework needs to support it. For example, in Estonia, the national curriculum is based on competencies, skills and learning outcomes. And this allows the teacher to actually blend learning, because this means that the teachers have almost full autonomy for deciding how the learning process is actually designed as long as the learning outcomes are fully achieved. This autonomy allows them to create networks and partnerships with, for example, employers or non-governmental organisations and bring them into the classroom or take the lessons outside of the classroom, for example, to laboratories, museums, parks, forests, wherever they want to, as long as the learning outcomes are achieved. We see in Croatia that schools do a magnificent cooperation with local communities. And for example, our schools do a great job with the police. So we have the police officer coming into the school teaching the first graders the traffic culture, and they take them actually into the street so that the first graders can experience what the traffic is like. And this is how we believe that schools should be open to local communities and that we all together should make it possible for our students to have the best possible education. Voila, thanks. I think this was from my side. Just a big thank you at the end for giving me this opportunity to link our discussion today to the broader policy level. I give back to Marta and I believe we have another one of our members from the working group with us, Martin, who shares his experience from Waldorf-Steiner education and who was part of our debates as well. Thank you. Yeah, indeed. Thank you very much, Ulrike, for giving this introduction. And without water, I would hand over to Martin, since he is here with us today. Thank you very much, Martin, for joining us. The floor is yours. Yes. Hello. I think one of the things that became clear to us when we started looking at the whole question of blended learning is that it's not narrowed and limited down to simply working with digital media. That, of course, is an very important part. But all learning really depends on learners, whether they're young children or young people or adults, indeed, having rich experiences, which they can then process, they can internalize and out of which learning and skills and knowledge can emerge. But this process of facilitating meaningful experience can take different forms. One form which is particularly important, I think, is direct experience, that is children, young people actually doing things, making things, working in the outdoor classroom, as it were, going into nature, doing projects, environmental projects, ecological projects in nature, doing work placements in the working place, making contact with local communities and availing themselves of, if you like, the local cultural provision. In other words, going out and having direct experience. The second really effective mode of experience, as we know, is narrative. In other words, somebody tells us a story, explains to us something that we perhaps can't experience directly. They share something that they have an intimate relationship to, that we, as learners, visualize in our imagination. We bring our embodied experience to actualize the stories, as it were, that we're given. And that's a very powerful way of making sense of experience. The third realm, of course, is that of all forms of media, whether it's image, moving image, video, whether it's text or websites and so on. This is an indirect mode of experience, which, of course, can bring us in contact with things that we otherwise wouldn't be able to meet. What all three of these modes of experience require is a process of mediating, of facilitating. Experiences can be quite chaotic when you have them in an immediate sense. It's only afterwards in recalling them, in retrieving them, that we can give these experiences a shape. We can clarify, perhaps, what it was that we saw and heard. We can find language to describe it. We can put it into our own words. And this is a process which needs to be guided, steered by an educator, so that the learners can make sense of their experience in whichever medium they've been in. And out of this sense, they can come to an understanding, they can make meaning through these experiences. And in a sense, we've come to realize that this term blended learning has a fourth dimension. That is that all these different modes of experience actually need to be blended, in the sense of integrated, in ways that enable the learner to make sense of these experiences. So the blending doesn't stop just by us either having hands on experience or using digital media. It's this process, dialogical process, this communicative process of making sense and making meaning with others together that is very important. And this is generally something that children and young adults will need to be facilitated in, perhaps even in adult education, to some extent, this is necessary. And it's through this facilitating role that schools begin to have a reconnect to the community that they are embedded in, whether they are a school in a large city, cities in a sense are huge, great educational spaces with all the things that cities provide, but also, of course, in rural areas where perhaps community is something more tangible and experienced school needs to become a place where real life is experienced. In other words, the schooling element that is making sense and making meaning, we take that into the world. And my experience has been that when we do that, then the workshop spaces, the farms that we visit, the communities that we visit, they themselves enter into a different process of learning because they're encountering young people, children asking questions, they're reflecting on their own world of work. And in this sense, we have blending school and community in a new way and having, of course, access to digital media enhances that considerably. Great, Martin, thank you very much for this contribution and for bringing us into the blended learning warden and in this new perspective of blended learning, which I'm sure it's really useful for our audience today. And I also saw that the chat stopped for a while, which is not a bad sign. It's a great sign because it means that people were really paying attention to what you were saying. But we invite you, of course, to stay with us for the rest of the presentation and keep an eye on the chat because if you have any comments, thoughts, please feel free to post them. And I'm sure Martin will be happy to reply directly in the chat as well. Yes, of course. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so I think we can move on and I see that Petra is ready to give the presentation. So Petra, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us today. As I was saying before, Petra is the director of the School Head Association and it's a pleasure for us to have her with us today. So please, the floor is yours. I'm hoping to share my screen here. Are you seeing my screen? Yeah, we can see your presentation perfectly. Right. But is it correct that I cannot see it? No, now we can see it. Okay. Perfectly. Can you see it as well? Yes, now everything is okay. Well, good afternoon, I would say my dear colleagues, because today we are going to talk about schools, open schools and the school partnership that we are going to have as an effective path. We are in a very interesting and dynamic society at the moment. We are actually a disruptive society. There is happening a lot. And that's what we are going to talk about, because our children grow up in this society and school partnerships are very important to prepare our kids for this world and for the future world. Now, who am I? I was introduced as director of ESHA, the European School Head Association. This means that the school head, the local school head associations from 23 countries are part of ESHA. So I did see come in a lot of countries that are actually connected to us, and that was a pleasure to see. For myself, I am Dutch. That means I'm from the Netherlands. I was an educator. I've been a teacher. I've been a school head. I've been a school board. I've been president of my national school head organization. And as a mother, I've seen education with my three boys in many ways. They are grown up now, but the passion for education, for my part, is still here. Now, first, it's very important that we talk about the why and the perspective that we choose, because we are talking about schools. And around the schools, we have the partners, the parents, the educational partners, the other partners, and of course, this virtual world, which is going very fast and the blended learning that we were just talking about is an excellent example for this. But is school the correct perspective, or should we start when we talk about open schools always with the child itself, with our pupils, with our students? And let's stick by the world around the child. There is, of course, the home. There is the neighborhood. There is the social life, sports. It can be child centers, child cares. But also in the lives of our children, the virtual world is a very fast growing world. It's actually a kind of concerning world because our children spend a lot of time behind the screen and they see a lot of things that may or may not be true. And for a lot of things, we don't even know what they are seeing, what they are doing. So coping with the world is very important and connecting our schools, open schools for open societies, it means that we have to take the whole world in account. Now, we have a number of great societal challenges around us. And I want to refer about the Europe 2020 strategy, where are a lot of issues addressed like demographic change, well-being of people. They want to work on food security, sustainable agricultural. We have to think about the forest, the maritime, the water, the bioeconomics. We want to have a secure, clean and efficient energy in our world. The agenda of Europe also addresses that we want to have smart green transports. We think that it's important that there are climate actions We have to think about our environment. We have to use our resources in an effective way. We want secure societies. We want everybody to have well-being and not live in poverty. Those are a lot of challenges. And they come from the European Union, which may feel like it's a top-down strategy, but actually it's not because this is exactly this dynamic world, this disruptive world that I mentioned, where our children are growing up in. And it's not an extra thing that we are going to prepare our kids for this world. It's the world that they live in. So let's not think about open schools for open societies as something new that's coming towards us. And again, education has to solve problems from society or from the world around us. We have a lot of work. The work pressure is enormous. But this is not what open schooling is about. I would actually say it's the contra, because if you take this up the way it is meant, you are going to work on real needs in the communities outside the school. Actually, as Martin has just presented it, real life, real life around the kids. And if we are able to have this real life as an anchor point to actually form our education, this is what we are going to do with the concept of open schooling. Now, in my presentation, I'm going to present to you three projects which were all funded by the European Union. One is the Open Schools for Open Societies Project. One is the I Diverse Project, which is actually about island diversity. And one is called the Faraclos Project. And all is about learning together in the real world for learners and teachers, one of the most important motivations to do what we do and to actually live in this world and together. My focus, of course, is about school heads. I am the European School Head Association, but it's not only for this. School heads are a linking pin and leadership matters. I will refer to this a little bit more often in my presentation, but the school head is the linking pin to actually connect the administrative community. You have to do with society. You have to do with authorities. There is a lot of paperwork. There is the social and cultural environment around the world. And there is the school community, the community with the students, the parents, the kids and the teachers, all the educative partners and the school heads are the linking pin to actually connect all these partners and to see the who, the where and the how of all the partners and how to incorporate them in our education. Now, the concept of open schooling means, first of all, that we will meet real needs. But it also means that whatever you are going to do with your projects and with your approach, it will be presented publicly. You will draw upon the local expertise and experiences and you will foster the collaboration. You will work together with the society around your school and you will find that everybody at the same time is an actor, a researcher, a learner, but also somebody who is actually presenting in this world. I am going to give you some examples later on, but it's important to understand the characteristics of open schooling. First, as I said, it's about community projects, real projects which are engaging and interactive. But it's also about the design thinking approach, meaning that the deeper looking means a deeper learning and that you actually work on realistic solutions, solutions that can actually be applicable in the world around the school. So we are going beyond theory and acting in a real way. It's also about collaborative inquiry. This actually has to do with the binding of your local situation in the global world. And I like to use this term, localization. Everything you do local has a connection with the global world. Sometimes it doesn't seem that way or sometimes the world seems something far away, but we are all connected and everything you do as an individual, as a group, as a school has an effect or is effective about this world. And that's what collaborative inquiry is about. The last characteristic is about the personal geography. And this has to do with every individual. We all have thoughts, ideas, dreams. And the way of open schooling means that if you approach it in the proper way, everything can become reality. I would like to mention people like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. They started with very bold dreams. Maybe people actually thought whatever they want, it cannot happen, but it can. They had a personal geography and they had this plan in their mind. But it's also about artistic expression. How you actually express what you learned, what you see, what your question is, your worry, your emotion, your well-being. Now these four aspects are very important if you choose the open schooling approach and how you want to actually involve them in your society. There is this project. I only show you the website, which is www.openschools.eu and we have there an open schooling roadmap. In this roadmap you can find the actual ecosystem of open schooling. I'm not going to explain this ecosystem and show you what's on the map. I just want to pass your eye to this that you can find on this website, the ecosystem and also in detail worked out how you can approach to work with the ecosystem. So if you want to look after this webinar about the theories and actually see this roadmap, find it on the website and make it your own. Everything is free available, of course. Now before you can start a concept of open schooling, support mechanism is needed and the school head is a very important Lincoln pin also in this because the leadership needed to start open schooling is quite large but it starts with change agents which is more than only the school leader. It means everybody can become an inspiring leader of the school community. It can be a teacher, can be a parent, it can be a student. A change agent is somebody who actually is able to inspire others, take them with you and inspire a process of acting. When you have this change agent actually thinking about meeting the local needs, we do need support of school leaders because you cannot capture innovation in your school alone. If you're a teacher with a great idea you need to work together with your school head because in the Lincoln pin that I showed you before it's important that you have the support of the leadership because together you have to decide on appropriate strategies. You cannot just put innovation in the school, it needs a strategy because you need to take others with you in this process but it also means if you really want to end up in open schooling where you engage society that you need a cycle, a structure of constant reflection towards your transformation because the line is never straight. You don't start here and you actually go from A to B. It will always be aligned with a lot of curves and all the time you reflect, you plan, you do, you check, you act and you adjust and then you plan again in a way to get to the goals of your innovation. But it also means, and I think it was also said in the previous presentation, that the position of school in society, in the city, rural, island is changing. Schools are going to be hubs. Hubs are kind of core institutions in the center of the local society because that is where your children come from but it's also where they live. It means you are going to work on sustainable innovation of ecosystems and the ecosystem should be looked at more broad. It's not only a biological system but an ecosystem also means a societal system where people respond on each other and where actions actually make a difference and involve the system. Now, open schooling has of course a real theory, a kind of model and it all starts with the green on the left side stimulating. Before you can stimulate others, you have to make an analysis of what is the real need around you, scan your horizon, find your innovators. They can be teachers, they can be policymakers, they can be students, they will be leaders because somebody needs to be stimulating the process itself. Second thing, which is always a part of open schooling and think about this design thinking approach, you will need a scientific underpinning. You can not just say, the sun is dangerous for us. No, you have to have a scientific underpinning like what's actually happening? Why is this a real need in society and what is the actual question that we are talking about? Then you come to the next stage of incubating your process that you are going to this innovation, to the open schooling and actually make a change. It means that you are going to create communities, the communities with which you are going to work together and develop scenarios because only when you work together in teams, both for designing the process to identify the question and to meet the real needs, you are ready to accelerate and actually manage knowledge and coordinate the process. And you see that positions can change. Once there is the leader on top, but it couldn't be the teacher, it can be the policymaker, you all have different positions in this model. Then, if you are ready, you are going to look in your local society and actually find the building blocks that are needed for your approach of open schooling. To make for yourself the model, which building blocks are in my society and which are necessary to make our open school actually open? How can I make my school a hub in society? And it means that you have to focus. Now, all the issues addressed mean that you can focus on STEM, but it could be something else, STEM education, like science, technology, engineering, math, but also the A of art could be here. But you can also choose to focus on things like diversity or take only one part of STEM, like the environment or something else. And you have to think about your pedagogies because if you are going out of the school, it means you have to change your pedagogy and you will no longer be only standing in front of your classroom transmitting knowledge. It will mean that actually you are going to coach processes, you are going to coach learners and in a way you are going to be a learner yourself. It means you have to look around the physical space about your classroom or maybe the playground, which labs do you need are the labs, a room in your school or maybe the labs are outside. It can be your garden or the forest or the lake around the corner. The digital environment, how far you can use the educational technology, but maybe you can even use the mobile phones that children have. And how can you connect with the local society, which is your primary partner. And in the end, how you make a difference for the global community. And all through this line, it's always important the teacher is the professional and the professional development of the teacher is crucial to remain ready to have an open school. In the end, you see the green blocks. There are these competencies you need this research component and entrepreneurship. Now I've showed you a lot of theories and it may have been a kind of abstract, but I'm going to give you some examples of what we actually mean. And I start with some examples from the I Diverse Island Diversity Project, which puts diversity design thinking in STEM education at the center of the way that they have created their open schools in open societies. Now, what have they been starting? They have chosen real subjects and on the islands, it was very obvious that plastic in the water was a very important issue that actually was dangerous for fish, for people and for the nature in the whole. So what can you think of to change the minds and what could be the new entrepreneurial ideas that you can work on? Together with the students, they designed several activities, but also products. There was a trail, they went on the beach to clean the beach. And then they were thinking, well, if we only collect this plastic, that is not an open schooling concept that is cleaning a beach. An open schooling concept means that you try actually to make a circle, like a life to life circle. And how can you reuse this plastic? This school made reusable bottles and gave them to the student to see that plastic does not only have to be used once, but they also use the old plastic to make pieces of art. And by using it this way, they wanted to raise awareness in the community. They also spoke because they are in a warmer zone and there is a lot of sunshine. They spoke about the environment and the atmosphere, about ultraviolet radiation. And together with students, they found out how to make sunscreen at home, how you can actually make the cream to protect yourself from the sun. And in the research part, they find out why this is important, why is UV dangerous for your skin or why is it important that if we pollute the air that actually there is more UV entering our systems. But also they thought about how can we involve the younger children? So they designed a puppet show to tell with their hands and their puppets what actually sun can mean in your life. It can be a good thing, it can be energy, it can be something you have to be aware of. They designed leaflets together with the children that you can hand out to the parents. All kinds of practical forms on how you work together. And the students shared also their work in local newspapers, they had television shows and they were also thinking together with the students, together with the corporate companies around the school in how you may create a business so that you actually can earn something from the plastic. And I will show you what they have done in the next slide because the children have been thinking about making bracelets for their arms but also for selling and show people what was the purpose of their open schooling project. Another was bees for the future. We all know that there is an ecosystem that birds eat insects, insects need flowers, flowers are a part of the world. So by actually starting small with bees for the future they were able to gather with children to plant in a school garden some flowers. They actually made a home for insects. They created new spaces in the parks around the school. They had these pollinair hotels and in all the way they involved the children in the research, in finding the facts, in thinking about how you can actually use the school around you, how you can work together with parents, how do you need your municipality. And after all these projects, these were activities. I want to come back with you to the learning goals because we are used before you teach that you have your learning goals as a teacher, very clear what you want the students to learn. And that's what you also do in open schooling but the ecosystem that you think of is a bit larger because if you actually think about the world that you are going to live in, it means that you have to have goals which can be more abstractive like raise awareness, more abstractive like we want a sustainable world and what does that mean for us. So you have some goals which are actually higher than the first goals that you should present in your lessons but there are also the second goals because by putting children together and facilitating that they work in groups, you also work on the language, you also work on calculations, you do numeracy and literacy because when you research facts, you actually need a lot of things from other subjects. You need geography, you need physical, you need everything that is actually in your curriculum but by making it interesting in an open schooling program you are engaging children in a different way. And by doing this, you make the teachers, the students, the parents, the society, the policymaker, you make everybody as actor a learner. You research the problems, you affect your community, you make experiments to understand it better and by doing so you are learning. You are learning by doing and you try of course to share everything you learn but also everything that you produce. Now, here the characteristics are back and you will see that there was this community, there was the design thinking, there was the collaborative inquiry and of course the personal geography was there because children have fantastic ideas and dreams and when you put them together, doing it in an open schooling project, you are actually working on the 21st century skills in an amazing way, which is beautiful for children to experience and also to feel valuable because by being a part you create a new culture of partnership, a culture where everybody matters and everybody is important and we all know when you feel important, when you feel your talents are engaged, it means that you have more confidence, that you can be more resilient and that means that your well-being will actually grow in this culture of open schooling. Engaging this environment makes that you have vitality in your community as a school and the family in the society around you and you foster the learning independent and interdependent. Now, if you think back about the priorities of Europe, I think you already recognized a lot of them. I'm going to present to you now another project which was called the Ferakus project and the unique thing about the Ferakus project is that it takes everything I told you from open schooling and the hub that you can be into a more structured way of working and this is a beautiful picture of how it can look but I'm going to take you a little bit into this big picture what is actually said. Remember, in the beginning, we spoke about the school community where the children, the parents, the teacher, the school heads are actually a community and that is around the school. But what makes this Ferakus project so engaging is that we actually involve the higher education and the universities created not only their contribution in research but also they created children's universities and later in the presentation I will show you a little movie on how it works with the children's universities. Ferakus is about forming a local educational cluster, a group of people, a group of organizations working together in a structural way and here you see the universities, the higher education but you also see the industry and the companies appearing. So actually it's very important that you also talk with the companies around the world in your society because they will be engaged not only to work with the children as the workers of the future but also because they are also engaged in equality in well-being and actually helping our children further and they have a lot of resources that can help schools to become local educational clusters and work together. Now in the cluster there are governmental units that can be your municipality that can be partners from your political or educational system and there is the civic society and you can think about NGOs, partners who actually want to make a difference in the environment and it's nice if you look around and you can find new partners who actually are interested in everything this school does but also are interested in society. It can also be for example media, newspaper, television, multimedia. So look around you, look around your school and think about yourself who can be in your local educational cluster but always take the researchers, take the higher education in and see how you can form this children's university because having a good design thinking approach may mean that you need a little help in your school. The project is the Ferreclos project. You can also find it on a website so I'm not going to take you through all the theories but I do want to show you a little bit about how these local educational clusters are actually formed. How can you approach to do this from your starting situation? And in the Ferreclos project it is called the Venice Model. Now you all know Venice as a beautiful city with a lot of water and a lot of islands where houses are and there are some bridges. As you can see there are some small bridges connecting the little islands but you can also see the school as a floating island in the sea you can see the university as a floating island in the sea and it's very nice that all the partners are there but it's a kind of difficult that the water is in between. We are used to work on an island as a school we are used to work on an island as a teacher but then comes the school head as the captain of the ship and he thinks about designing some ferry boats where you have a crew of dedicated people your teachers, your parents, your pupils and this crew is in charge think about how everybody should be engaged the crew is in charge of establishing these connections between the islands and then the ferry boat starts to make connections and people start sharing ideas they are going to find the real needs. Now the connections with the boat are not so sure so actually it could be nice to build sustainable bridges and then you get back to this partnership if you really work together with the society with the universities, the companies, the NGOs, the municipality you are going to have bridges and this is how you are opening up your school but also opening up society because you can go in and out and work together and if you are very successful you will have a locally rooted system where things are really connected and engaging all the time and in the end this is how you can also connect to the global world now a little movie is going to be shown and we had some technical issues so I am going to ask the assistants of the bureau to show this little movie and I stop my presentation from here Back again, can you confirm? Yes, you are back if you want to put back your presentation It was here, I have to share my screen Again, yes This should be okay? Perfect So as you understand the Venice model was actually a metaphor about connecting the school head as a captain the team and the partners as the people in the boat but it's actually about this local educational cluster and the movie showed you how for real this can be done with the university around your school Hereby I give you an example from Trieste There are several countries where a lot of local educational clusters are existing You see the academia, the schools, the associations the citizens, policymakers the private sector you can choose your partners In any way development, the school leaders they have to learn in network together with the teachers together with the pupils, the parents and society learning by doing sharing successes working in a group working in this local educational network and actually set the compass for adopting the implementation It's very important to share your success and it's very important to adapt the concept to your local situation because you have to see who are the partners around you in your school, in your society Now a bit of theory it's very important that the practice is usable that you have enough support in your school and that there is enough strength of the evidence that you find by your research It's important that you really know what the needs of the target populations are, your student, your teacher but also the population in society Are the choices fit for your community and what actual capacity can you find to support the new ways of working So first you go by planning and if those factors are not in place and the school head has a very important role here this partnership is not going to be successful Now the simple formula is actually that you define what needs to be done how it needs to be done and where it needs to be done In a schedule you can see that the what is about effective practices the who and the how is about the implementation the where has to do with the context but if you do everything right in a good process you will have improved outcomes and when you think about outcomes you can really think about learning results but also socializing of children the collaboration, the 21st century skills and actually deep learning occurs because children are not only learning things by hearing it, they are learning things by experiencing it So school heads you are the linking pin to organize this all from the who to the how and beyond but it is not only about school heads because we all share in leadership every partner shares in leadership Open schooling needs leadership from many people and somebody needs to take the role of the game changer it needs that you are sharing knowledge and experiences and that you create time and choose a structure it may be the lack, it could be a little bit different it means that you use input of research and that you really take use of this in your development and you have to identify good practices look around you in the projects that I show you and see how good practices work and if you find them and you adjust them for your own context share your good practices as well because working together in an open school it means giving and taking Now networking, collaboration in partnership, it needs leadership but actually more frankly I would like to say networking, collaboration in partnership it needs you I all invite you to open up your schools start working together in partnership or legs and I hope that you will have a very successful experience it's all about opening up thank you very much Thank you very much Petra for the presentation I see a lot of comments chat, a lot of thank you for you the presentation was really useful so it's great and thank you also for leaving us with this invitation to open up that's great but maybe if you have time to stay we have one question for you, we had it in the chat I'm going to read it out loud Sometimes school building management questions such as security and cleaning might stand in the way of a shared use of a school for non formal and or adult education do you find good solutions? Well, it's actually not me who will find the solutions I think the question is addressing the real need because this is apparently what you need to do you want to do something with your building and if you make that at the center of your search to be in open schooling look around, who do you meet who can help you, who supports you so this is actually this culture of change if you have a question like this put it at the center of your real need and see what you can do with your teachers, children and society around the school Thank you very much Petra for addressing this question we still have a couple of minutes so I invite the audience to post any other comments or questions if any and meanwhile I would like to remind you that we just posted in the chat the link to the evaluation form so please save it for later you can fill it in later but you have to save it now and for all those who were asking about the presentation the PowerPoint, the links everything will be available afterwards on the webinar page meaning the presentation the recording of this webinar and the links so you'll be able to find all the material that you need as of tomorrow on the page where you signed up for the webinar Thank you very much again also to Ulrike for the introduction it was really a pleasure for us to have you here today and of course to Dr. Martin Rosen for his intervention as well but before closing I would really like you to give us a final word, a final suggestion to share with us some final thoughts so maybe we can do a round Ulrike and start with you since you were the first talking Thank you very much also to Petra it connected I think very well what she presented with what we had discussed and there's a role for policymakers of course also to make this happen to have school leaders the space and the resources and the backing to have this freedom of taking this basically being this lighthouse in the local community and we saw from the chat I saw some of you posted also successful e-twinning projects I think this is exactly the kind of initiative that is worth sharing across Europe. Thank you very much and keep on connecting to the European School Education Platform for more resources also on this field just to say that school partnerships is a monthly focus topic that we have for January 2023 so we have more resources other projects as well as this recording from this where we now on the platform stay tuned and thank you very much for joining today. Thank you very much Martin would you like to say something before we close? Yes, yes I would thank you and thank you very much for the presentation I think what the open schools movement are doing is exactly what I was describing one thing I would like to add to that this interdisciplinary aspect that the children are not only being hands-on and learning about ecology and they're practicing their literacy and perhaps even their numeracy what I think we need to develop now our intelligent methods of assessing this learning and particularly the learning not just of individuals but of groups because an awful lot of what we do in life is based on teamwork and being able to make visible this element of learning through projects I think is an area which is underdeveloped but fascinating projects and good luck with your continued work. Thank you Martin thank you very much and of course Petra I'll leave the final word to you I would only like to say and I think that's why we're all together here we are not doing this for you me or us we are doing this for our children and for their world and I think something more inspiring is not existing open up your school because we're doing it for them. Thank you, thank you very much. I would like also to thank the online audience for joining us today you were a lot and very active in the chat and that was really great, really appreciated to see all it's really appreciated to see all your comments and your thoughts and following us during the presentation I wish you all a good evening and stay in touch bye bye everyone