Empowering teachers personal, professional and social continuous development through innovative peer-induction programmes
Start: 28-02-2021 – End: 27-02-2024
Project Reference: 626148-EPP-1-2020-2-PT-EPPKA3-PI-POLICY
The LOOP project, which aims to contribute to rethinking the teaching career, making it more appealing, is one of the most recent projects coordinated by INOVA +!
LOOP stands for empowering teachers personal, professional and social continuous development through innovative peer-induction programmes.
The LOOP is a policy experimentation project that aims to contribute to the shift towards a comprehensive teaching profession policy that spans all stages of their professional careers namely by:
- Structuring a peer-learning induction programme based on mentoring, to support the initiation of the teaching profession and adapting to a new workplace culture.
- Creating a mentors’ programme for the development of competences to guide and support new teachers during the implementation of the induction programme.
- Testing and validating the induction and mentoring programmes in the schools of the LOOP network.
- Preparing policy recommendations for the integration of induction and mentoring programmes in the National policies and frameworks of teachers’ continuous professional development.
This project is co-financed by the European Commission under the Erasmus + Program (Key Action 3 – Support for policy reform) and responds to the need to identify solutions that promote the motivation of teachers at an early stage in their careers, and the diversification of career opportunities within the education system, namely for experienced teachers.
The innovation of the project is based on the promotion of a collaborative process and co-design of the programs, actively involving teachers at the beginning of their careers, more experienced teachers and school principals, in all phases of the project: design, testing, improvement and validation.
The project foresees the implementation of these policy instruments in a real school environment, following an experimental methodology, allowing selected groups of teachers to be the first users and beneficiaries of the programs to be produced.
Among the main results of the project, it is important to highlight:
- A catalogue of good practices for teacher induction programs and initiatives
- A teaching and teaching career model
- A teachers’ induction program
- A training program for experienced teachers to be mentors
- Guidelines and recommendations for the reform of national and European education policies associated with the teaching career
The consortium, led by INOVA +, has 13 partners from seven countries. We highlight the participation of DGAE – Directorate-General for School Administration of the Portuguese Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Education of Slovenia and the Institute of Education Policies of Greece (representing the Greek Ministry of Education). Additionally, the following research partners are involved: Casa do Professor and the Education Institute of the University of Lisbon (both from Portugal), the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), the University of the Peloponnese (Greece), the University of Vic-UCC-Barcelona (Spain), Friedrich-Alexander University in Nuremberg (Germany), LUM University in Bari (Italy), IDEC (Greece) and the “Petit Philosophy” Association (Croatia).
LOOP also has 42 associated partners, the majority of which are schools and teacher training centers that, together with the partners, form the LOOP cooperation network, which will be strategic in all phases of program development, experimentation and validation.
