Reflecting4Change

Promoting the use of self-reflection tools to support innovation and systemic change in schools

The Reflecting for Change (R4C) project aims at proposing an advanced support framework, as well as a set of core policy recommendations, to schools seeking to introduce a type of holistic change that will ensure a meaningful uptake of sustainable innovation, with an emphasis on achieving improved learning outcomes as set by the Europe 2020 strategy.

R4C is a Forward-Looking Cooperation Project that promotes the use of self-reflection tools to support innovation and systemic change in education and training institutions. These projects highlight good practice in using and, in particular, following-up results from the two self-reflection tools developed by the European Commission, namely HEInnovate for higher education institutions and SELFIE for schools.

In R4C approach, innovation is understood in terms of a school’s pathway to digital maturity (e-maturity) and its comprehensive relationship to the use of ICT, as well as a school’s pathway to openness demonstrated in its relationship with external stakeholders, in parental engagement, in fostering the well-being of its community as a whole, in its ability to combine the delivering of the curriculum with a study of local challenges, in its willingness and capacity to share its achievements with other schools and in its engagement with contemporary Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) challenges.

The consortium will organize and coordinate large scale pilots with schools to evaluate the effects of, and systematically validate the proposed approach by implementing numerous activities and exploiting at the same time the opportunities offered by major ongoing initiatives and reforms, in Greece, Portugal and Italy. The project will be implemented with a bottom up approach in 300 primary and secondary schools, in urban as well as in rural areas while the sample for the validation of the proposed approach will consist of 1,500 teachers and 15,000 students.