About

The PLATON Summer School: the innovative way to teach. communicate. inspire. educate. learn. participate. collaborate.

The course is organized in the context of the PLATON project. Its main objective is to introduce to teachers innovative learning methods that have demonstrably engaged young children in science in the long term and help them develop 21st century skills. More specifically the objectives of the summer school are:

• Introduce STEM teachers to inquiry based teaching and learning approaches that meet the needs of different types of students;
• Facilitate teachers in switching from a teacher-centred to a student-centred type of every day teaching and thus enable them to use an inquiry-based approach in their every day class;
• Present to teachers a knowledge structure that overarches all science disciplines and which will allow them to use it in class with their students as a reference point in making connections between science topics taught in different disciplines and different grades as well as between subjects taught at school and everyday life.
• Foster interdisciplinary teaching by introducing innovative collaboration techniques between teachers of different science disciplines. The course will offer teachers the necessary tools to synchronize their teaching and facilitate the common, interdisciplinary creation of learning activities.
• Enable teachers to build upon concepts already introduced in other (science) classes establishing links between ideas and phenomena introduced in different science disciplines while avoiding unnecessary repetitions and allowing more time to explore in depth the subjects at hand.
• Acquaint participants with activities on contemporary topics and showcase how they can be used in the science classroom.

The course will also strengthen its social cohesive and pan-European dimension by inviting participants to be part of a community of practice that will allow them to exchange and share ideas, experiences, concerns and educational resources with fellow teachers across Europe and introduce them to on-line learning repositories, portals and educational metadata.

The repertoire of resources and tools and activities that will be presented in combination with the hands-on and minds-on activities will facilitate the participants in learning how to deploy and integrate them in their school environment and everyday science teaching practice and also how to contribute their own work into educational repositories and share it within a European community of practice. 

Participation in this course can be funded by the Erasmus+ Programme (Key Action 1, Mobility project for school education staff).