co-lab.eun.org

CO-LAB (http://colab.eun.org/) was a forward-looking project focused on making collaborative teaching and learning a reality in the classroom. Being able to collaborate effectively is a valuable 21st century skill, yet teaching about or through collaboration remains rare in schools because of a lack of understanding of what real collaboration in an educational setting means, and because existing policy conditions do not always enable it to flourish.

Practitioners and policy makers need a dedicated space and time to experiment and better understand what collaborative teaching and learning means in terms of policy and practice. CO-LAB provided these stakeholders with that opportunity.

CO-LAB aimed to:

• Design as well as enrich existing collaborative teaching and learning scenarios and train teacher trainers, student teachers and teachers to implement them
• Allow teachers to test these scenarios in the classroom and report back concerning the enablers and obstacles they faced
• Evaluate the process and define how education policy frameworks could be adapted to better support collaborative teaching and learning in the classroom

CO-LAB’s expected achievements were to:

• Make a considerable contribution to capacity building through collaborative teaching and learning scenarios and a MOOC training teachers how to most effectively use these, all of which will be made available as Open Educational Resources
• Impact on national and European policy development on collaborative teaching and learning through evidence-based results
• Help to mainstream effective collaborative teaching & learning in schools through the project’s final recommendations

CO-LAB (December 2015 – January 2018) was coordinated by European Schoolnet (a network of 31 Ministries of Education aimed at bringing innovation in teaching and learning to key stakeholders within the education community), and funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Programme. The project’s partnership was rich and diverse consisting of Ministries of Education, teacher training organizations and research institutes from Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Poland, and Portugal. Each of these countries has recruited teacher trainers, student teachers, teachers, head teachers, policy makers and other relevant stakeholders at national level to participate in the project.