INCLUSIVE APPROACH TO SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHING
Inclusive approach to secondary school teaching to tackle early school leaving launched across Europe
Press Release
CARMA is the name of a European funded initiative that promises to launch an inclusive approach to secondary-school-level teaching, based on the introduction of non-formal learning practices and collaborative methods that promote interaction, creativity and reciprocal learning between teachers and learners.
Based on the Reciprocal Maieutic Approach (RMA) of Danilo Dolci, a group of European partners from education and training backgrounds, has been working on an inclusive and innovative assessment tool that will allow teachers to monitor and respond rapidly to student’s learning progress, while it also informs parents and update the wider school community about the learner’s constantly changing needs.
Since early 2016, CARMA’s partners have been dedicated to intensive research on the phenomena of Early School Leaving (ESL), on collecting best practices concerning collaborative learning (CL) and on identifying existing national frameworks for assessing teachers’ competences. As a result of such investigation, a comprehensive report entitled “Early School Leaving – Statistics, Policies and Good Practices in Collaborative Learning” (1) has been produced.
In this report, CARMA’s partners showcase statistics about ESL in light of distinctive factors such as gender, ethic minorities, foreign born and degree of urbanization. The analysis is taken one step further into the different national contexts and it is quite interesting to see that while in Austria and in France the rate of ESL (7.3% and 9.3% respectively) is below the target for Europe 2020 Strategy – which is set to 10% – all other countries of the partnership, present rates that are above this (10.1% in Belgium, 14.7% in Italy, 13.7% in Portugal, 20% in Spain and 36,4% in Turkey).