The 1st day of the Summer/Spring School aimed to create a common ground from which the participants would initiate an exchange of ideas and experiences. Therefore, activities on Day 1 focused on familiarizing the participants with the reasoning around which the summer/spring school was structured and offering the participants opportunities to discuss concepts and aspects of content of teaching and learning for sustainability. Participants formed different subgroups during the activities to start getting to know each other and to reflect on what they had “brought in” to the community of educators who pursue learning and teaching sustainability. Day 1 also included a reflection and evaluation of Summer School 1 and the expectations of Summer/Spring School 2.
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Rationale of the Summer School – Welcome (Dr Pavlina Hadjitheodoulou-Loizidou, Head of In-Service Training Department, CPI)
Dr Hadjitheodoulou-Loizidou presented the rationale of the Summer School and stressed the importance of teachers’ professional learning in capitalizing on teachers’ interests, challenges and needs and offering learning opportunities and in underlining transformation of teachers, groups and contexts. She focused on the characteristics of professional learning support programme, the inquiry-based methodologies and the whole school approach.
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Welcoming from the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute (Dr Elena Hadjikakou, Acting Director)
Dr Hadjikakou welcomed officially the participants to Cyprus and presented some information about CPI as one of the Directorates of the Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth. She noted that the CPI tried again to provide innovative, and pedagogically sound professional learning experiences with practical value, and to give all the participants the opportunity to meet with educational practices that are used in Cyprus regarding professional learning and sustainability and with the history and culture of the island. -
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Brief presentation of the TAP-TS project (Dr Rachel Bowden, TU Dresden University of technology)
Dr Rachel Bowden, as the TAP-TS project coordinator, made a short video presentation, updating the TAP-TS project.
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Ice-Breaking Activity
Maria Eracleous and Efi Paparistodemou | Cyprus Pedagogical Institute
The CPI facilitators used the activity ‘Stepping into Another's Shoes’. Partners, in turn, shared data/information/elements concerning their professional context (e.g., years of service, years of service at the specific school, previous work experiences, position e.g. substitute teacher, subjects/courses they teach).
The participants worked in pairs and each partner, in turn, mentioned the information about himself/herself and explains whether each piece of information "carries" emotional weight and how heavy this weight is. For each piece of information that "carried emotional weight", the participant/teacher briefly wrote the information on a piece of paper and got a lego, of a smaller or larger size, depending on how emotionally "heavy" the information was. The lego symbolized the weight of emotions that each piece of information carries (while some information may not have emotional weight). The participant/teacher then placed the legos in his/her partner's nylon shoes. In this way, each participant/teacher “got” in his/her shoes the emotional weight carried by their partner. When both partners completed this procedure, the Professional Learning Facilitator asked them to walk, carrying the legos/weight inside their nylon shoes and described his/her experience.
