The continuous development of teaching staff in a multicultural environment

Education today has changed a lot. Our classrooms now have a much more diverse population. The original teachers’ training does not suffice to prepare teachers for the multicultural mixed ability classes that they get to work in. Therefore we worked towards improving the competences of teachers based on continuous and current changes in society and we worked on innovation of methodology: tools to facilitate integration in the classroom. The five partners (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Latvia and Turkey) are all familiar with these new circumstances and worked together to improve the skills and knowledge of teachers in the different schools. We exchanged information so that we could learn from each other’s strengths. Some partners were more experienced in dealing with mixed-ability classrooms, others more with diverse nationalities. Each of our learning activities focused on one of our objectives. During the first one, in Finland, we got acquainted with new tools, demonstrated by the different partners, during the second one, in Latvia, we exchanged good practices to develop teachers’ professionalism according to the needs we detected.Based on the results of the learning activities and to make sure the programme will have an impact on the future, we created two tools. Firstly a training program for the teachers with a focus on the skills needed to respond to the changes in society in general and diversity in the classroom in particular. The second result is a website on which we collected tools to deal with diversity in the classroom. The results can be found on the website.