 Dear participants, presenters and panelists, I think it is time to start the meeting. I got the honor of moderating this meeting with the participation of four presenters and three panelists and in my office of doing that I have to start with just saying that this workshop is the reflecting for change workshop. It is about the use of self-reflection tools and two implement changes to build innovative, open and e-mature schools in general. For four presenters, I would like to thank you for joining us from the same institution. I would also like to thank you from Science View and Rosa Doran from Luplio in Tarativo de Acinomia Portugal. The panel will be extended with Nicoletta Giannozzo and Giorgia Fermari and obviously the all others might take part in the first place as an expert in that issue. First, I would like to say a few words about the present past. So for Chris, as a coordinator of the R4C project, since 2001, he is the director of annual Germanic Agobi Center for Teachers Training. His main research field is design, application, evaluation of virtual and digital media environments. He has been involved in a long series of EU joint projects and technology funded projects, member of the European Academy of Sciences since 2003 and served as an expert every letter of the European Commission F-Pay 5 and F-Pay 6 programs, also as a consultant to the development of the F-Pay 7 science and society work program. He was the community community community perspective coordinator of the ODS Policy Self-Protection, who is a PhD in astrophysics and the second one in the use of advanced technologies in science education, has more than 100 publications and 600 references to his work. So first, I would like to ask so for Chris to have his presentation. Please, so for Chris, it's your turn. Thank you very much for this intro and also thank you so much for all the work you have done in preparing this workshop. The aim of this workshop and the talks that are going to be presented is to demonstrate how we can use a series of tools that are reflecting on schools and teachers' practices as a way to set a roadmap towards sustainable change and development of the school as an organization. Also, I will try in this introductory talk to demonstrate how we have really managed to transform the problematic situation due to the pandemic to a challenge and finally to a success story for the schools that have been involved in this pilot experimentation at three European countries. So I will, let's say, start with this main communication from the European Commission about eight years ago. The idea was to support the opening up education movement and here I would like to highlight that this was introduced as a policy guideline from the European Union in 2013, but already from 1998 Eden had set in place a mechanism that is called Open Classroom, promoting the same ideas and same concepts. So this year, along with the 30 years celebration of Eden, we are, let's say, on the 23rd year of developing this initiative, let me say, this strategy towards openness that is supported from the Open Classroom group of Eden. So following this communication, it was really important to highlight the key areas, let me say, of openness and this has to do with open content. So we have to provide opportunities to teachers to use open educational resources to adapt different pedagogical approaches according to their needs, according to the needs of their students to have an open pedagogy scheme and a very important third component to have the school open to communication, to collaboration with external stakeholders, local communities, industry, research institutions and so on. So we see and this is the key point, let's say, of reflecting for change, the digital competencies, let's say, of the school, the immaturity of the school as a vehicle towards openness. So in the framework of reflecting for change, we are trying to combine these two key areas for schools, the openness and the immaturity building further on these initial ideas from the opening up education scheme. In the period, let's say, since 2013, numerous tools have been developed to assess either the school immaturity or other key areas for the school development. And also, there were some national initiatives, but also international initiatives like the eLearning Roadmap in Ireland, the European Initiative of Digital Schools of Europe building on these initial ideas and trying to expand this approach, always focusing on the same idea that the schools are through a self-reflection exercise, they are trying to develop a strategy to move to the next steps. And also, there are similar efforts in the US and of course in other parts of the world like Australia or Canada and so on. These efforts are focusing, let's say, mainly in three key areas that they have to do with the school organization, the leadership and the vision, the school infrastructure, but also on the opportunities that the school is offering for professional development of the teachers. And more or less these areas are describing the key components of the 21st century learning environments, as we call them. In a recent study of OECD, trying to describe all the components of the school, the whole school ecology, is presenting the interconnection of of these three key areas, the teacher professional development, the school leadership and the school organization and governance. So for us, also in reflecting for change, these were the key, the three key areas where we have focused our approach and our intervention. In this workshop, Menelaus is going to discuss in detail the development of these tools. So the R4C contribution was really to try to connect two existing self-reflection tools, one reflection tool that was focusing on openness and the selfie, the very well-known tool that it is used from almost all schools in Europe to assess their immaturity. So building on the initial concept that we are trying to combine openness and immaturity, we thought that by providing tools that are bringing these components together will give us a more integrated view towards the school development. Of course, this is not only the case, just assessing the current status of the school, but along in the framework of the project, we have developed a profiling mechanism, collecting the school data and informing really the database with the school data, offering a recommendation system for developing the strategy and a number of strategies because we have, as it is clear, numerous schools, so they cannot be a single strategy for all of them. So our aim was to demonstrate that we can improve the performance of the schools towards both openness and immaturity. The implementation effort included 324 schools in Greece, Italy and Portugal, 1,700 teachers and more than 16,000 students. As said, the overall approach of the project, building on school autonomy and offering opportunities in a very demanding period and numerous virtual experiences for students, gave us really the opportunity to see the pandemic and the problematic situation as a great opportunity and a great offer for the schools. So the involvement of teachers and students was really amazing. We had numerous implementation opportunities because we gave the schools the freedom to design, to adopt their projects based on some initial ideas, so they were able to design their web journals or run web radio applications. They were able to implement projects about climate. We have designed also in cooperation with external stakeholders missions to space where we have organized contests for schools to make experiments in space preparing future space trips. We have implemented virtual environments and we offered the opportunity to students to design their wind farm and develop projects related to sustainable energy solutions for the future. We have implemented a number of contests for students to develop their own seismometer, for example involving a number of schools in Greece and in Italy. One problem during the pandemic was the fact that the schools were not able to perform field trips or visits to exhibitions or to science museums, so we have created in virtual worlds such experiences for the students visiting exhibitions related to space and to other things. We have run a number of international activities like the Eratosthenes experiment that even in the period of the pandemic managed to have numerous participants. We have discussed issues about the future of food systems and our efforts were really recognized at a high policy level. We had the opportunity to present the project to the vice minister of education in Greece and get her support for our activities. We have organized virtual visits to research infrastructures and numerous events with the support of technology, an activity that is really running now in parallel with this conference and in the framework of IDC 2021 conference with the theme global meets local. We have run a challenge for students to reimagine the world after COVID-19 and this gave us an opportunity to see numerous ideas from young children from all over the world because this is a global initiative about the life with the support of technology after the pandemic. Just to transfer also our message to the key theme of the conference, the lessons from the pandemic. I'm using here the fact that the pandemic is offering an opportunity to rethink how digital technologies can be used to support teaching and learning in schools and clearly they are offering an opportunity to think a different future for education. The message from Andreas Slicer from OECD is that the pandemic can demonstrate, let's say, how really the response of the educational community can cut the red tape and introduce personalized learning in schooling, which is very important because it is closer to every single student needs and offers better learning outcome and this to be done we have really to empower teachers because we believe this is the key issue to support them to integrate creative projects and activities in their teaching and really support their students' work. Four messages coming from this, they have to become aware from the specific weaknesses in their own practice. They had this opportunity and they can see how technology supported all these obstacles they have to face. They need to be motivated to make the necessary improvements. They have to gain understanding from the specific best practices that were implemented and they can act as change agents in their settings. This is the key point where this self-improvement process for the school as an organization but for the teachers is very crucial. Closing, we are expanding our activities. We are organizing an open school in summer school this year and this is the program. It will take place the first week of July and all participants have the chance to register and attend the courses as it is taking place virtually. I would like to just to highlight that it is fully harmonized with the new European Bauhaus, the very big initiative of the European Commission that sees a new role for schools and especially school buildings in the innovation wave of the new European Bauhaus where schools can act as an incubator for innovation and creativity. This could be another major challenge for schools to face in the near future. Thank you for your attention. My colleagues in the following will go in the detail about the project, the innovation model, the community building strategy and the data that we have collected. Thank you. Thank you for this nice presentation and putting the project into context in the European context and in the future context as well. Now I would like to ask Nikos to present his thoughts. He graduated from the National University of Athens Department of Educational Sciences who was awarded by a master degree level diploma in education technology from the university leave the process. He was a researcher in the university leave the process and assistant on the online courses in Mons University also in Belgium. For three years he worked as an ICT teacher in the European school of Brussels 3 and in 2005 he was appointed by the UNESCO International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa and the UNESCO cluster office in Addis Ababa as responsible for the teacher training workshop for ICT competencies. So Nikos I would like to ask you to present your part. Thank you very much Ferens. Thank you very much all the attendees of this workshop. It is always a pleasure to communicate with people around Europe and exchange ideas. I'm honored to present our work in Reflective for Change. As Sophocles said we'll present the school innovation model that we have developed and it is the basis of our activities in Reflective for Change and it is the path from self-reflection school self-reflection to school development. So the aim of the Alphos project is to bring at the forefront of digital school innovation and openness the self the process of self-reflection self-evaluation. We strongly believe that this process offers a highly realistic view of the actual needs of the school and give us opportunity to reflect upon crucial aspects of schools as learning environments, as centers of innovation and as hubs of social engagement and responsibility. Our focus, our aim is to foster schools that are immature, digital innovative and open to the society. A school that is open and immature is a school that introduces innovation in the classroom, creates an attractive environment for all, puts inclusion in the center of the learning activities and effectively engages families, local communities, the local industry experts, universities, science centers, museums and in general the local community of the school. This immature and open school sees itself as an ecosystem of innovation, builds on synergies with the aim of addressing local and glockable challenges and what we need to do through the self-evaluation phase of the project is that we need to have a school that has a clear vision about their openness and immaturity regarding different aspects of the schools and in this way the school will be able to have a developer plan to meet these diagnosed needs. In this way the school will be able to incorporate strategies that address and encourage problem-solving teamwork, active citizenship, critical thinking and gender equity. By having a clear view of the needs of the school and the school heads, the teachers and the students, the school will be able to support a continuous professional development with an emphasis on the acquisition of digital skills and towards a shift in the mindset of the school community towards systemic change and open schooling. In this way the teachers and students participate and collaborate with within social platforms both virtual and physical in order to design ideas, contents, projects, bringing together the whole school community but also building collaboration with other schools in the local area but also on a European level bringing an emphasis on societal challenges. And also schools are supported to have activities that in which teachers and students work with scientific data that are derived from their work in school projects. In order to help schools become open and immature we need to foster a chain reaction in the school. This chain reaction has four steps. In the beginning we need to increase the mass, building teacher and leader capacity, it is vital in this transformation towards an open and immature school and to do that we need to create a set vision for how education best can meet the needs of all learners in order to develop a plan that translates this vision into action. The next step of this chain reaction is to increase the density by building partnerships and capacity for change working together with science centers and museums, research organizations, experts, communities and local businesses and bringing them together in school projects that meet the real needs of the school and that are based in a specific innovation action plan. Then after building the density we need to increase the temperature. How can we do that by bringing into the classroom a unique connection of resources and tools that are based on real work problems by giving students and teachers more opportunities to reflect upon and evaluate the quality of their own thinking and the products for feedback, reflection and revision. We need also to give to the students and the teachers the opportunity to interact with other scientists, other people working in common projects in order to receive feedback from multiple sources and also by building strong communities and I'm happy that Rosa will follow about community building why we need to build local and local communities because we need a space where teachers, teacher trainers, educational policy makers, parents, students come together and are included in a process in order to expand the learning environment beyond the school walls and thus expanding opportunities for teacher professional development and last but not least we need to increase the reflectivity. We need to have technology enabled assessment and support mechanisms in order to build knowledge on the school needs and we need to have assessments that can be embedded within learning activities in order to reduce interruptions to learning time. This is let's say a graphic representation of the school aphosy school innovation model which is a school journey towards openness and digital innovation. It is all about building, creating a culture of change by having on the first step harvesting for change engines and creating supporting schools that are willing to open to new horizons. Then we need to work with inspiring leaders in order to have leaders of school innovation and openness and mentors and by creating and supporting the whole process in the aphosy platform with the self-reflection tools with the opportunities of working together we can support schools to become digital learning commons. In this way we can foster viable digital chains in order to transform our schools to sustainable innovation ecosystems. This is an ongoing process where we start with the evaluation of the openness the immaturity and the digital innovation of the school using the self-reflection tools. After using these reflection tools the school built their own school developer plan to address the self-diagnosed needs. According to the plan the school can build and empower the school's change team which develops student projects that address local global challenges. After developing these projects the school team the change team can again use the self-reflection tools to measure the change to the level of immaturity and openness of the school. I was honored to participate in the Selfie Forum two years ago in Madrid and there were some challenges facing schools around Europe that need to be addressed like the aggregator data that can be used for policy making to strategies to incentivize and reward schools to more peer-to-peer learning for teachers and we are happy to see that what we are developing in aphosy is addressing a large number of these recommendations. It is crucial to understand the role of data from self-evaluation in planning for school innovation and openness. The school needs to have a clear understanding of their needs in order to create projects that fit the needs of the school in order to build networks of schools and innovative teachers and that way we can foster parental engagement and engagement of other stakeholders like science centers, the local community, and the industry. And in this way a Aphosy is planning to create a teacher training academy to support the whole process. Sophocles has already presented our summer school. The Open School League Summer School will take place in the first week of July. It aims to familiarize participants with the open schooling approach and to help participants understand the use of self-reflection tools as a vehicle to support innovation and systemic change in schools. You can find more information in azia.ea.gr about the continued teacher support through our training programs. I hope that I didn't use more than the time that I was supposed to use. I would like to thank you very much and you can contact me for more information or questions in my email at azia.ea.gr. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Nikos. It was really exhausting to oversee what you already have done and my best experience is that if I go to the home page of Aphosy, I can see the set of the evaluation results of the schools all over Europe. I can count in each country how many are enabled, how many are advanced, how many are integrated or advanced. So I think it really goes quite well. So our next presentation will be held by Menelaus Sotiriu. He is a director and president of ScienceU and has a vast experience in realizing European proposals over the last 15 years. Just very briefly, he is the national coordinator of the Greek Student Parliament on Science, the European project that runs in 16 European countries. In the last 15 years, he was running and organizing about 30 European projects. He's included in the avaliator database of the European Commission for the Horizon 2020 SLS, the Science Foundation of Ireland. Well, I think Menelaus, it's your turn to present. Thank you. Thank you, Ferens, and thank you for the opportunity to present the work that we have done concerning the R4C platform, actually, that includes also the tools for the self-reflection. The main aim actually is to measure the change and concerning the openness and the immaturity as it was also presented and is recommended through the R4C. So we had actually the challenge to create a platform and first of all a tool that could measure this change, based of course in existing tools that were measuring the openness and the immaturity. So we tried to offer to schools the opportunity to start first of all with a reflection on their status concerning the innovation, offering them actually three levels of change concerning the management level, the process level, and the teacher's professional development level. All of them, all of these three levels including some components in order to try to see processes and procedures that they need to follow according to specific recommendations that we have offered them with specific statements in order to see within these statements where their status could be. So we have considered four categories of school typology according to their status. As you said earlier, referring to the map, that we could see schools that are in the enabled typology consistent, integrated and advanced, meaning that starting let's say from a level where they do not have so many procedures and so many maybe not a clear vision or a strategy and following the next statuses that schools could be in a level that they have already integrate partially or more in the advanced status activities that we recommend through the R4C model. So these were the main categories where a school after taking some actions that we have already included in this platform. I will come in the next slides concerning the platform that actually this platform offers four main facilities to schools in order to follow this journey to innovation. The first step is to take the self-reflection tool so to measure their status. Then we have the school innovation planning recommender system with specific strategies according to their status and recommend specific activities also according to their status in order to offer them some ideas or some guidance that they could use in order to develop a specific school development plan including activities that we offer already or they could think of their of new activities that they would like to implement following a specific strategy and then it is the school innovation profiling tool that while the school is implementing activities could update their profile with activities with projects with communities that the school is developing or participating and also offering a networking platform seeing other schools that could collaborate or exchange experiences but also offering some recommendations for professional development with courses that the teachers of the school could follow. So this is actually the first page of the tool where we have this map as we have already said we have in this pilot actually activities that we are doing three countries with 324 schools from these three countries and if someone goes there it could click on the pin and see the profile of the school and also other data. Also schools could register right now we have this registration for these piloting schools but of course after the end of the project we will be able other schools to join and someone could search according as you said earlier also according to the level of schools that would like to see or to the country that would like to search for instance if the school is from Greece would like to to search for schools around with the same level or higher level of status. If a school is participating as I said earlier the first step is to take this actually questionnaire of the self-reflection tool consisting of these three levels with the eight items that each level consists of and to self-reflect, self-assess their status. After doing this here is some of the statements in a specific item after doing this procedure the school is getting a specific report according to what they have choose for their status, their status and of course the recommendations for the specific strategies and specific activities that we recommend according to the status of the school. Here is what they are getting concerning if a school is in the integrated for instance status a proposed strategy as well as proposed activities that have specific links with explanations and recommendations how to follow these activities. This is the recommender system with the strategies and the activities after that the school should start working on its development plan with specific areas that they need to feeling in order to have a specific plan on how they are going to implement activities and try to follow the innovation model. You can see here some sections of the plan so they get also a report so to have a specific report in PDF and they could also any time they could go back and update this report and start again or let's say go in another plan or activities that they would like to follow. After these three steps actually the school is able to start updating their profile on the tool so the school have all these opportunities they could upload projects to inform about communities that participate or communities they have created educational resources that they might have developed during the implementation webinars that they are organizing or participating or summer schools that they are participating but also offering networking and professional development activities that are offered according to the status that the school has. Here I took as an example a Greek-Germanic agreement that have already feeling some of the activities that they have already implemented. The networking is schools that the tool brings schools that are belongs to the status that the specific school is and higher so they have the opportunity to go to their profile with their contacts communicate with them and start working maybe with them in specific projects or collaborating or just exchanging experiences on how they have already took some projects and implemented and also there are professional development activities that are proposed to the schools with summer schools courses winter schools this this is an ongoing actually project process that we are also update all these courses continuously. So this is actually in just one graph what the steps the the school should take and according to this we have start measuring we are now in the procedure to analyzing data that we have already already gathered we have already the data from the first measurement that we have the 324 schools you can see here the average of the results that it is in around 56 percent and as an overall result for all the schools that are participating this means that the average of the schools are according to the levels are belongs to this 56 percent and this also goes to the each one of the levels the management level as i said earlier the process level and the teachers professional development level and we have already analyzed a bit more than 100 schools that have already filled in also the post measurement so the second measurement and actually the results are are are very impressive i think that in these 103 schools that representing more or less the 32 percent of the schools that we are following in this project we have been an increase in very innovation level innovation status by 20 percent from the first measurement that it was before start implementing activities according to the R4C innovation model and after they have already implemented activities so you can see here in this 100 school that the increase is they have increased their innovation status by 20 percent but also it is also interesting and we have already measured data from the students while they were implementing implementing activities with pre and post questionnaires and also the results here are very positive we have already as an example from italy already 672 students that field pre and post test and we have right now analyzed that showing demonstrating that their science motivation were increased in all these sub-scales that we are measuring like a intrinsic motivation, career motivation, self-determination, self efficiency and great motivation and you can see here the pre and post in each one of the sub-scales and we have already investigate that there is an increase in their interest also the same goes to the school motivation as a school we are having similar results in all these sub-scales and this give us let's say the opportunity to be very optimistic in our hypothesis that we have from the beginning of the project that while the school is increasing their innovation level at the same time the school and the students interest in science is increased so but this is let's say the first data that we have analyzed and hopefully by the end of the project that is in a few months we will be able to present a more specific analysis of all the data from all the schools. Thank you very much. It was a nice final say that you analyzed how they progressed during the project so I think we are a bit behind the time schedule we have to speed it up a bit. The next presenter is Rosa Doran. Rosa has a degree in physics in scientific university at the Catholic at the Sao Paulo in an MRC in high energy degradation in the faculty of science of the university of RISBON and a PhD in science education at the University of Coimbra if I spell it correctly I will and he is a certified trainer by the scientific and pedagogical council of the continuous training university of Minho Portugal and the teacher training in the areas of physics and astronomy. His professional activities from the late 70s to the 90s were connected to industry management in finance and administration areas and since 1992 the main activities are related to science research public and public outreach and science education. She is presenting the presenter of Nucleo. Please Rosa start the presentation in 10 minutes if it is. 10 minutes okay okay I'll try my best. Okay thank you. Okay so hello everyone I will shortcut a few of the ideas that I had for interacting with you today and I initially apologize for that but so my presentation basically it's on community building and participatory engagement activities and the main idea of this gigantic task is to take the policy makers and visionaries vision for what should be done and materializing it in the field so the ideas are awesome they make complete sense and we think why haven't we done this before but when we reach out to the field the reality is not exactly like that so we have to create like a marketing envelope and convince very occupied headmasters and teachers and other people in charge of the departments inside the school that what you have to offer will actually help them in their their mission so we start with offering the tool that was perfectly presented before where the school can reflect on what they've been doing and how well they are placed in terms of digital update in community openness. We support them in creating a development plan where they can change anything that might be in need of changing if that is the case we provide them with a list of suggestions of projects that the students can update and then sometimes okay they are fully convinced and we ask them to provide opportunities for their teachers to to engage in training with us and here come the teachers so the first step the first obstacles are overcome and I do call them obstacles because it's not always easy to convince people that have the power to make these changes to open the gates for us there are many offers and they are not always sure how confident it should be that we can actually deliver what we're promised so we have to trust in our in our consortium we have to they have to trust in previous opportunities they had with us and the partnerships that we have to establish so if we had time I would now put you in an experience on how we work with these teachers so usually we start every interaction with them asking a little bit about themselves we give them like the five minutes of fame we ask them where do they live we ask them things like what is your favorite vacation dream vacation I would be doing that with you if it weren't for time pressure so I won't do that so friends won't be angry with me but we always start with that so that the participants feel comfortable with us they feel like okay it's not me who knows a lot coming to preach to you it's a cooperation that we're doing it's a co-creation effort so we are working together to build something better for the school joining our expertise the policymaker expertise and their own expertise in the field because no one knows better how to work with the students than themselves so this failure called engagement is where we have to date the teachers and convince them to go along with us because if we don't convince the teachers and we know that top-down approaches where the head must tell the teachers you must do that don't really work bottom up not always work as well because sometimes the head masters the head of schools are not open to that opportunity so that doesn't work as well so it has to be a mixture of things so it might seem very easy but it's not it takes a lot of work to do that so you engage the teachers they say okay great I love what you you're proposing to me let's do that then you start the phase of training them but the training cannot be a simple training just okay come join us one hour here go home and do all the work you have to walk alongside with them so I'm giving you the the the example of Portugal where we have actually actually accredited training course where they have 25 hours with us for training on how to integrate digital digital tools in their in their teaching their teaching practices and how to open the school to the community and they have 25 hours to work with the students that helps a lot so this is the training piece of the puzzle and that helps a lot so that they they know okay I have to integrate this in my in my practices and I have the place to do that and they are helping me know how to do that so introduce them to new tools we introduce them how to handle data with the students we talk to them about inclusion we talk to them about modern practices for for facilitating learning and we talk a lot about differentiation and personalization so all are pieces of a bigger puzzle that when when you want them to incorporate digital technology it's not about the equipment that they have in the classroom but how they use the equipment that they have available to them this is another difficult obstacle to make them understand is not how many different softwares apps and tools you know is how you integrate them to deliver your curricula and this is the the the tricky part that sometimes is missed by people in the field providing teacher training on digital education then the open schooling part which is how can the students as was presented by Nichols and Sophocles and when allows become the change makers of their schools how they can be the ones solving the problems of the community and using digital technologies technologies to do so and how they can bring the community and all the expertise of the community inside the school to support the school improve to the level that they want to do so how do we do this we introduce the teachers to the design thinking methodology design thinking for education here again I would be interacting with you and I would be asking you what in your vision was the most urgent actions to help educators doing COVID-19 we kind of know the answers they you know as Sophocles said in the beginning we all knew that teachers needed education in digital education we knew that selfie is there much before COVID we knew that for a fact but it was kind of hidden under the carpet we all knew we knew what we had to do but there was not really an emergency to do the we will do that and then COVID came and everything came out in the open oh my god we don't know how to use technology to do this how are we going to do it so we asked people what do we want to do do you need us to do how can we help you and interacted a lot with the teachers and the first step of this was the field part feeling the problem what is it that exactly you need in order to to thrive in digital education the second part it's also a co-creation part is what solutions would you suggest I would interact with you again and ask you what solutions would you suggest so we have teachers doing the second part of design thinking which is imagine which solutions they could use to solve the problems that they have in their hands and this field and imagine part are not ready made solutions that you take off the shelf it's personalized to their group of students to their schools to their community there's a whole science behind it it's not one one solution fits everyone no there's as many solutions as schools as many solutions as classrooms and I dare to say there are as many solutions as students in a classroom so this two teachers need to know how to do this and then what do you do next well sometimes courses and here okay great I taught you all the tools you imagine the solution so it was a pleasure to meet you go and do it we know that that's that doesn't work so we go one step further and we provide them support to materialize their ideas and to do the next step which is create and then your heart stops beating because what you see that these teachers can do with the students is really mind-boggling in our particular case we had very little time to work with the teachers in Portugal because in Portugal that is a large effort to bring digital transformation to schools so in parallel with what we are doing with schools they were also working in the development of their digital plan but they did enter the work with us more than 100 schools because they thought that working with us would actually enrich and help them materialize what the digital plan wanted them to do and this was the opportunity for them to materialize to put in practice the digital transformation plan so we had lots of very nice projects just a sample of the projects that were done by the teachers and then of course there is the part of sharing which I will come to a moment and the the other important part is the recognition you have to recognize the effort of the teacher and this is something that especially in Portugal is not properly done people tend to talk about teachers as there are many pejorative things that are said about teachers and in our experience Portuguese teachers are really very good teachers and they do a lot of good work with the students and they go always the extra mile to do a lot of efforts with the students and we decided that okay we need to recognize this work so we're bringing up a campaign in our social media highlighting the work of each and every teacher that work with us in reflecting for change so of course provided that they want us to do that so it's going to be a long run we're going to to be for more than 100 weeks publicizing it if we do this once per week which I think we'll have to do more but the projects are coming they're materializing things and they're really very nice and we are capturing attention of social media towards the work that they are doing so in the end we build this beautiful community of teachers it's more than 200 teachers you imagine we have 10 teams of teachers it's 25 hours which each team of them you imagine how for how long we are in front of the screen with them which has been a blessing because we've been learning a lot and we are building this beautiful community so putting all together we have the engagement part we have the training part we have supported we are giving to them we have recognition that we are ensuring that they receive and we have the community and this is what we call the five pillars of community building that we are using for reflecting for change and I cannot materialize to you the result of that because it's it's really mind boggling it's it's very very very strong and I wish I had a couple of hours or days to show to you what these heroic teachers have been doing in times of pandemic working from home and in schools and with school closures and reopening and not knowing how to use technology or not knowing how to apply but we have picked one example and in this example I'll tell you the best part of the story which I didn't knew to tell you in the end so this school it's a specific school that have been working with the students and they came on board very late in the process and we have trained them and in like two or three months they have put together all these amazing projects where kids from first second and third grade work together to create awareness to their families it's in their community about the importance of recycling so they have created scratch applications it's it's not the the teachers that created the students created with the support of the teachers they have created cahoots they have created what you see down here it's something called I didn't know about this called the how world where they translate the stories that the students create to symbols so kids that don't speak the language or kids that have autistic problems for instance can accompany and also support the work so I will stop my presentation here and I will I will share another screen so let me just stop it here and I will share their work with you okay I will share again here and this is the work that they presented to us yesterday so I will stop it briefly just show a little bit of this so I will stop the presentation because it's it's long and I can tell you that in the end you have the kids singing the kids from that school singing and what I learned yesterday is that these are not well it's a normal classroom for that particular school what I didn't know is that that school it's a reference school for refugees so many of the kids are refugees from Pakistan from Iraq Iran and Ghana and they also have other kids from 30 different nationality coming from former colonies and very social challenged the situations and there is one group of students that are autistic and they're all in this project so it was like a blast and a stamp of success and we had the teacher sending us email saying thank you very much for accompanying us in this journey and make us better teachers to create better human beings so I think this is the story I wanted to to share and to say that as a national coordinator was a privilege and it is a privilege for us to be part of the second for change thank you very much Rosa it was really fantastic but you presented very how they say colorful and interesting and even the the music was amazing at the end all the problem is that we got another 14 minutes to go and before we start the panelist discussion I would like to ask all presenters all attendees and all panelists to switch on their cameras we would like to make just one screenshot in the meantime a few words about the two panelists that were not introduced yet. Georgia Fermari is currently attached to the Institute of Education and Policy as consultant A in the field of natural sciences coordinator of scientific unit of natural sciences technology and mathematics head of scientific units office cycle B unit of scientific subjects of primary and secondary education it's very important for us because we are talking about the k-12 sector and from 2015 he's a she's a board member of the Institute of Educational Policy she is teaching undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Greece and abroad and Nicoletta Guillenotzu is a scientific officer at the joint research center of european commission with a famous GRC she is currently leading the selfie project a self-represents to design to support digital empowerment of schools in which currently is used by almost 1.5 million users in 74 countries so please switch your camera on and we would like to try to make a screenshot of all attendees. Perens you are you giving the talk to Nicoletta and your Georgia? I gave the floor to I give that word no to first to Georgia to try to submit some of what we learned here today together please Georgia it's your turn Georgia are you there? Thank you so I would like to share with you some thoughts concerning the implementation of R4C project in Greek schools so first I would like to say some key points that research gets shown worldwide for example that the students decrease their enthusiasm for school and they don't put the best effort in school subject because they don't believe that school is an exciting place for learning as well we know that in many countries we have overloaded curricula and at the same time we have low scores in science education as well in reading their maths so R4C is a project that gave to us some replies on these points so in our effort increase to develop a modern school which will be characterized by innovative curricula quality textbooks which invest in the human resources and so on we wondering what to do in order to pass from the status the first status to the second one so every school is unique so how we can move from its current status pedagogical administrative and concerning human resources to an open modern sustainable school as I told before R4C gave us the opportunity gave the opportunity to the schools to do a step forward through a clear vision and strategy as colleagues before have already described which supported an interdisciplinary environment on innovation a promote collaboration with non-formal and formal education schools succeeded finally to unfreeze these current status attend school and support them move them to transform to an open and immature school in other words to overcome the typical structural inertia in Greece what we have done in order to convince the schools to work on R4C we followed an open and supportive process the first step was the announcement of and the application from the interested school to participate I mean in R4C in this announcement we have put clear objectives the clear objectives of the project so all new from the beginning that it was a quite demanding procedure and this helped them do not beat some point during the implementation of the project the interest the school submitted their application in which they explained why they would like to participate to the project they also describing their experience in school innovation they propose a school project mainly on STEM and how they use responsibly research and innovation in the project in the framework of R4C they organized their pedagogical team and appointed their coordinator we have also asked them to stay with us for two or three years this was important because we think that we need this duration in order to change the school the second step was the selection an independent committee selected the school except the above mention a criteria they took under consideration the geographical distribution of the schools and also the type of the regions urban sub-urban rural coastal EDC and finally the variety of the type of the schools we have selected kindergarten primary secondary modern schools school of arts vocational school special needs schools and so on this election procedure gave us a very representative school sample from all over Greece and of all school types the first step of the implementation of the project philosophy it was the project philosophy from the school teacher heads and students by using project resources and previous speakers have already presented all these resources in details it is true that Osos and R4C developed a quite demanding educational environment both for teachers and students although this gave the extra effort knowledge competences and values to face the new unexpected educational situation during the pandemic it was not an easy procedure although R4C schools were almost ready to face the new reality and to continue the teaching learning through online familiar tools and one more point is that we gave emphasis on in communication and mentoring we have established a frequent but not anointing communication with schools both with headmaster and the coordinator of the pedagogical team of the school schools are receiving every day many administrative emails and the defining line between informative emails and not necessary emails is very thin so we have sent the emails that we need to send except the tools and general guidelines for the implementation of the project teachers knew that R4C team was there at any time to support them and solve their questions by sending an email to the project team or to R4C help desk and by participating to optional online weekly meetings via MS teams or BBP platform and others meetings were optional although more than 70 percent of the schools participated what were the results the conclusions what we have seen the last years the last four years in the framework of Osos and R4C project we have seen that schools continue ongoing self-reflection discussion and learning setup school projects are incorporating more and more ICTs schools became more active in dissemination of their activities and results teacher became more familiar with platforms and participate year by year more frequent in online training activities and schools prepare and organize their own training activities for their teacher and the school community to students finally increase interest and motivation on sciences in other words implementation of R4C tools in greek schools so that participated schools are increasing the openness and through openness gradually they are increasing their immaturity the combination of project tools with national initiatives from the greek ministry of education like 21st century skills workshops and self-evaluation of schools and other regional and local initiatives guide the school to increase more their openness as a result of this combination of national and european initiatives is that R4C project is recognized as a good practice for Greece in the framework of gene initiative finally it's clear for us that school are changing and they are changing because they want to change we are convinced that schools have the potential of staff to make a difference although sometimes they need the spark from the system itself or from an external factor like R4C project to increase the temperature in order to start changing thank you very much thank you very much it was really interesting that you summarized where this project will have the risk was to develop and it was really really very nice and very very detailed now i would like to ask Nicoletta to sum up her opinion on the project and on the way developing the schools further in openness and the immaturity in the way we suggested using the R4C project as a tool hi thank you very much for the invitation and for this amazing work that has been presented it's really inspiring and i i wanted to connect a little bit the R4 chains with selfie and more broadly the self-reflection tools and the role they play let's say post-covid and after the pandemic why self-reflection tools are relevant and what are the the outputs for me two keys the two key messages come out one is the importance of collaborations during this period which was very stressful for schools what was revealed was the importance of openness and collaboration as R4Change sort of advocates the other important thing and i think within the school and without the school the other issue that emerged during this period was the overwhelming number of applications of courses of everything happening digital and the question is how do you decide which one you take and here you need the self-reflection to have to make a strategy to take strategic decisions where the the choices you are making as a teacher as a school are situated within a general strategy and here come tools like R4Change and selfie i will very briefly for those who don't know Ference mentioned initially that selfie is is out there it's an EU tool it's available it's online it's free it's anonymous available in 33 language versions interestingly i wanted to say that selfie was out since 2018 and last year we had we completed 1.5 million users and we have only almost 1 million last year i mean this demonstrates a tendency and i wanted to say also that we owe the 600 000 to Portugal which decided to use selfie as an instrument with all its schools to develop their their digital strategy i want to demonstrate a little bit because i think it goes along the ideas you have presented with the functionalities of the R4Change tool and with the community building what how we support the school development plan and i think these are things which which are going together one one issue which we have seen it is important is when schools take selfie where in in the questions which focus on the digital capacity of schools and how they use this technology participate school leaders teachers and students the schools receive a report with the results and there is a big issue which is what do we do with these results and how how do we interpret the results and we found out that schools need support in navigating on their data and identifying which what is important because these kind of reports i mean we have around 70 questions they can be overwhelming the other thing we have been doing because we think and i would like to to pick the latest point from the discussion about the R4Change and the importance and how overwhelmed teachers and school leaders are self reflection culture is important but it's not there yet in the schools schools try to integrate technologies but in order to develop this culture time and space needed so what are we are planning we have tested the idea of an action plan hackathon where schools take the selfie report they identified the areas where they need to develop and in a specific time and space schools and when we say schools we include students teachers and school leaders as well those who have the same objectives they work together to brainstorm and based on this brainstorming they they use the ideas to create their action plan so these are some actions we are taking along the lines you you have presented and a key thing going back to where i started and i will finish like in two minutes is that this self reflection process is a participatory activity and it's a collective responsibility i i was saying that when i was speaking i'm speaking with the R4Change colleagues and especially with Sophocles there is always like inspirational ideas and Sophocles was saying we're saying quite often teachers are very loaded but these imagine how much overloaded are the school leaders and this is a responsibility in effort that it cannot be in the shoulders of one person this is something where you need to involve the whole school community not only to contribute but also to to have ownership you have better chances of the changes you're implementing if the community members feel that they they have participated in what is happening so the idea of like a collective effort is quite important in this in this process with the hackathon we are trying the idea of creating a new learning space where teachers school leaders and also students students have ideas they have knowledge they can contribute it's not that what they're saying it will be transferred directly in the classroom but they need to be part of the process that's why we we feel that they have an important role and the other thing is that the schools and that's more for at the policy making level in order to have to encourage the self-reflection process to happen we need to create appropriate structures we need to have time we need to allocate a specific space we need to allocate resources from the school and the school leaders to find teachers and and other personnel who can support the process but also to establish new collaborations quite often we see that schools are overloaded to do more things and more things i i i see with the art for change approach a really nice idea of instead of putting everything inside the school let's connect with stakeholders outside the schools in order to enrich what we're doing instead of overloading the school and finally it's just i think it was mentioned at the beginning from the art for change and so for at least that this is a process of continuous development it never stops and there's emphasis on the progress instead of the results that's that's why what we're trying to to stress is not just the results when you're taking selfie but what do you do with them and in closing i just wanted to to raise your attention that in october we will be having the second selfie forum i think nicoz mentioned the results from the first one it's on the seventh and the eighth and you can look up what we're doing if you search on the internet but don't put selfie because you will come with ideas about how to take photographs you need to put selfie you and if you want to ask anything just use our email address and you can subscribe to our newsletter as well so i hope these were helpful and trying to connect and situate the ideas of self-reflection and and art for change thank you very much thank you very much nicoletta first of all you're nice and very vivid presentation how the selfie might run out and but i think it's really a continuous and never stopping process i mean the school development and anyway it is very true that every how do you say every improvement starts with a kind of a precise diagnosis and without the self-reflection tools the schools wouldn't have access to good diagnosis tools to just locate the starting points from which they have to develop further and second i would like to ask all the presenters and panelists whether they would like to say a final word after this workshop and from my side the parents i would like to clarify the the following and the main effort of policy experimentation projects like reflecting for change is really to make some some studies some experiments really on how we can improve the key infrastructure of the european union and offer a final result to schools so selfie is the the main vehicle in this in this process but let's say our work is let's say in in most of the cases in parallel trying to make the necessary connections with other fields and we are offering these results to the joint research center to the other services of the of the commission in order to proceed further and develop further the common infrastructure for all schools so it's important for everybody to understand the the landscape and the placement of the different initiatives let's say with this small scale project we have the the opportunity to collect the useful data that then we share for further analysis with the joint research center in order to make the overall strategy for the whole europe and i think this is this is very important so our our work is to support let's say the the work of the joint research center thank you very much so please and because maybe a few words it's been over here that we're using use another facilities and i still make mistakes about talking without unmuting myself sorry for that the whole process of reflective for change builds on the understanding of the needs of the school in order to to to develop projects to develop a school plan an action plan we need to identify the needs of the school community of the school as an organization we had the different levels of action so it is important to to bring self reflection tools in the core of the everyday school life to build a community of change inside the school that use these kinds of reflection tools in order to build their own process towards immaturity openness and and you know becoming and a sustainable ecosystem of innovation and i'm really happy to be able to support schools around europe in this process in these last years and it is a challenge to continue our work with schools in this framework thank you nicos maybe menos would like to say a few words as well from my point of view just developing more trying to develop and integrate all these activities to a specific tool i would say that it is really impressive the the dedication and the engagement that i have seen from the educators while we were starting as georgia said some years ago with osos it was really really difficult to use to the the educators to use to to use these kinds of of tools but while we are working now for several years with some schools new entries let's say but also continue from previous years i have seen that they are much more um let's say able and willing to use all these facilities that we are offering even if they are they are a a kind of out of their comfort let's say zone so i think this is the main the main positive i think issue that i would kept from all these years of following and supporting schools thank you very very much and last but not least close up well from my point of view i think that all these projects are very important i i i always you and those who know me i always mention these the teachers are the most important the profession in the world if they are the ones defining the future of mankind so if we if we don't support them with the necessary tools to empower the new generations the future pilots of our planet will do messy work as some of them are doing right now so i think this is really an important job and it's important that we have the opportunity to not only come up with these visionary ideas but also to find our way to accommodate this in the school field in the daily lives of teachers and materialize the support teachers all the way so that they they really bring this gigantic and brilliant ideas they materialize it and bring it to life so i hope that these initiatives will will keep building on this great ideas for me reflecting for change has this combination of digital tools and community building the bringing the school to the community and the community to the school and this materializes like the reality of the school life and this to me is very important thank you very very much and thank you for all all the panelists the presenters and also the participants to have this joint event to discuss this project and the future of school innovation in in europe in general now i have to close the meeting we have to give the the the room for the next session so we do not have enough time to to the further discuss this very interesting subject so thank you for all once again thank you in the name of even even goodbye thank you very much thank you thank you thank you everyone bye bye thank you so much thank you very much all of you thank you bye