The project MTD starts!
“Mindset for Teachers as Designers” is an Erasmus+ project funded by the European Union. The project is focused on teachers from the VET sector and aims to support them in becoming teachers as designers. Nowadays, in our fast-changing world, teachers are faced with complex problems in their everyday teaching and therefore require new skills such as innovation, empathy, design, creativity, problem solving and co-creation. “Mindset for Teachers as Designers” aims to support teachers in developing these new competencies and ways of thinking. Specifically, one approach that has been found relevant to support teachers in coping with the new teaching scenarios is the incorporation of design in the educational field. Therefore, “Mindset for Teachers as Designers” sees the teaching practice as a design profession and aims to support teachers in developing a mindset that enables them to deal with complex problems.
In order to achieve this, the project develops a “teachers as designers”-mindset framework to provide a complete picture of the role of teachers as designers within VET. Importantly, this framework is co-designed with teachers from all three partner countries to achieve the best results. During a two day design workshop, partners and teachers exchange knowledge and experiences about the teacher’s design thinking mindset. As a part of their preparation, the partners carry out a literature review and interviews, as well as an online co-design session with teachers. A further result is a list of design principles for professional development programs to foster “teachers as designers”-mindsets. With the goal of raising awareness and informing as many teachers as possible of the benefits of the project, the partners carry out dissemination activities.
Aiming to put this ambitious plan into practice and to coordinate the development of this project, the partners met online for a Kick-off meeting on the second of March. During the meeting, the partners from Denmark (Consufé), Spain (Instituto IKIGAI) and Finland (Muutostaito Oy) discussed the first steps of the implementation of the project, as well as all the activities that they will carry out through the whole lifetime of the project. At the end of the project, the achieved results will be made publicly available on the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform. The partners are looking forward to the publication of the results, which will allow many teachers to benefit from this project!