by DCU

The most recent SYNAPSES Teacher Academy partnership meeting took place at Sigtunaskolan Humanistiska Läroverket in Sweden, providing a beautiful setting for the visiting partners to interact with teachers and students involved in the upcoming project implementation phase.

These transnational partnership meetings facilitate face-to-face exploration, sense-making, and planning for project implementation. As a three-year project with multiple interdependent work packages, a close working relationship is crucial to the success of the SYNAPSES Teacher Academy.

After significant progress in the first 12 months, attention now shifts to the crucial upcoming implementation phase, with partners busy organising professional learning events with teachers and school leaders across Europe. These events are essential in promoting and supporting Sustainability Citizenship through student-centred, place-based education on a whole and open-school basis, developing the green competencies, skills, and attitudes needed to face future sustainability challenges.

The project meeting reflected on the successes of the International Summer School held in Marathon, Greece in July 2024. As this served as the first opportunity to engage teachers and school heads in professional learning activities, feedback was important in refining our future plans and ongoing development of project resources, supports, and professional learning events.

Time was spent planning Practice Reflection Workshops to re-engage the initial cohort of Synapses Teachers and School Leaders from the summer school. These workshops will gauge the impact of professional learning events on practice and explore ways to further support these agents of change for Sustainability Citizenship. They will commence in the coming weeks, with data gathering tools and workshop structures explored and agreed upon.
Over the next 18 months, dozens more Synapses professional learning events will be hosted in partner countries, both online and in-person. Pre-service and in-service teachers and school leaders will participate in these events, synthesizing and implementing learning and good practice examples in their own professional context. The effectiveness of the professional learning will be gauged through additional follow-up Practice Reflection Workshops in the coming months with these additional Synapses cohorts.

During the implementation phase, project partners will continue to find and select high-quality professional learning resources that promote Sustainability Citizenship through student-centred, place-based education at the whole school level. It was agreed at the meeting that over the coming academic year, project partners will identify resources related to Sustainability Citizenship themes such as ‘Energy Use’, ‘Food and Agriculture’, and ‘Environmental Change’. The goal is to select an additional eighty high-quality professional learning resources to be included in the SYNAPSES Teacher Academy offerings for participants.

For the duration of the project, we will continue to develop our SYNAPSES Community Platform, Resource Repository, and Learning Journeys for our teachers and school heads. We are excited about the potential impact of our partnership collaboration and look forward to achieving significant milestones together. We will keep you updated on our progress as we work towards our shared goals.