About
DROP’IN ACTION is an online portfolio addressed to teachers, showing the experiential phase of DROP’IN project in which teachers and students put into practice the methodologies and activities developed and included in the EDUC’ACTION catalogue. This phase was implemented in the school year 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, a period of time which includes the restrictions and social distancing rules due to the COVID-19 emergency, which has brought to a general lockdown in many European countries. The lockdown period led the project partners to a deep reflection on remote education and techniques to be used online.
DROP’IN ACTION is the systematic collection of these experiences, emotions, participation of school teachers involved in the introduction of non-formal education in their classes. All the experiences acquired are collected in our Online Portfolio.
After the testing of these techniques and the analysis of the qualitative and quantitative feedbacks, the current online portfolio has been developed, showing the results of the experimentation in the classrooms, offering to future users the potential of the techniques and the suggestions of the teachers who used them with their students.
Online Portfolio’s
Objectives
To share methods and resources used in the project;
To give examples of practical cases of experimentation with non-formal education methods in the formal education sector;
To allow the teachers who took part in the experiment to show their experience by sharing their successes as well as the difficulties encountered, their learning process and the one of the beneficiaries, in this case, the students;
The Methodology
The methodology used for the realization of this online portfolio was based on quantitative and qualitative data, collecting feedbacks coming from the direct experience of the teachers involved in the use of the techniques developed in the EDUC’Action: The Education in Action! Manual.
The main pillars at the center of the development of the techniques are the following:
Mediation and moderation skills,
such as the ability to solve conflict, communicate empathetically, provide structure for the group to work together;
Collaborative learning skills,
such as the ability to encourage and stimulate students to express their ideas and opinions, the ability to encourage group processing;
Collaborative assessment skills,
such as the ability to assess student performance clearly, using assessment guidelines and a variety of tools and methods tailored to individual student needs;
The use of non-formal education,
such as the ability to create an environment of well-being in the classroom and the ability to adapt methods according to the context and learning objectives of the class.
By going to the Online Portfolio webpage, you’ll be able to select a specific non-formal activity based on the needed skills you would like to implement in your classroom, with suggestions and results already reached in all the involved countries. It is an interactive way to provide you tools you need for your students and for your profession, exploiting the benefits of non-formal education in your classroom.
The development of this portfolio has been based on a parallel detailed collection of feedbacks on different stages of implementation, specifically in the following three phases:
1
Self-Assessment
Before the implementation of the activities, a self- assessment survey has been administered in order to understand the different contexts in which the project would have been implemented, together with learning needs to be met.
2
Evaluation
During the activities implementation, questionnaires and interviews have helped to collect feedbacks from the project participants.
3
Final Analysis
A final comparison and analysis of all the data have allowed to provide crucial information on the techniques used and on the educational context in each country, thus showing in the best way the content related to each activity.
At the following link, you can download our evaluation report filled in by the teachers during their involvement in the project, highlighting the increased competence and awareness on the topics covered by the project.
In this report, an analysis of each specific National context involved in the project will be presented, thus providing a general overview of the school community in which the experimentation of the techniques has been implemented, highlighting the impact achieved in each country.