About the school

Vestre Skole, located in Grindsted, Midtjylland, has approximately 600 students across three departments, including a special class for students with general learning difficulties and a reception class for multilingual children. The school employs approximately 90 teachers.    

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Motivation

Vestre Skole has been dedicated to working with projects for many years. So they already had lots of good experiences with that teaching method.

When they experienced that their students, especially boys, had become tired of school and struggled to find meaning in the traditional teaching methods, they felt a need to rethink teaching and didactics in an entirely new way. 
After visiting other schools that worked with PBL and seeing the enthusiasm of their students, it became clear to them that this was the direction they should take.

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Desired outcome

In collaboration with the leadership team and municipal support staff, we developed an ambitious plan for the school's transition from a traditional school with fixed schedules and subjects to a school focusing on project-based learning. The goal was to support the school's staff so that they could conduct five project periods, each lasting 8 weeks, throughout the school year. This required rethinking the schedule structure, team collaboration, and subject boundaries.

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What we did

As an introduction to the project, the leadership team underwent extensive strategic planning with the aim of building a scaffold for the staff throughout the first PBL school years. Before the start of the school year, the staff participated in workshops focused on a common language for PBL and understanding the school's journey, as well as concrete planning methods and didactic tools. Throughout the school year, staff were offered workshops that supported their current challenges.

Along the way, we facilitated an internal network of coordinators who met monthly, provided feedback on the progress of the grade levels, and were introduced to new tools they could take back to their colleagues.

The goal is to build capacity so that the school as a whole is able to continue the development work independently.

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Results

At Vestre Skole, they have already experienced many positive outcomes from our collaboration. For instance, they mention that teachers collaborate across departments and grades in a completely new way - they see a much better teamwork dynamic. Moreover, there are employees who feel like they have a completely new job and are thrilled to work in this manner.

They also notice that their students are developing both academically and socially - they have become much more courageous, skilled at collaboration, and possess a more creative mindset. As a result, the preschool achieved historically high scores in the language assessment test, and the 9th grade performed much better than expected in their oral exams last summer.

Furthermore, parents of children at the school share that their children talk much more about their school day at home than they did previously.
 

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