TEACHERS’ HANDBOOK

Great creative ideas come out from cooperation, sharing experiences and exchanging ideas.  The blended in-service teacher training that took place within the Everyday creativity project benefited from such fruitful cooperation and exchange of ideas of 20 teachers from Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania. The course and its results have been published in this Teachers’ handbook, illustrated with photos taken during the school visits that the participants attended during their on-site training sessions in Jyväskylä, Finland.

The handbook offers an overview of the online and on-site training experience from both the training providers’ and the participants’ perspective, then presents the learning materials and course tasks.

The readers of the handbook will find an extensive list of online available, free to use resources (articles, books, research papers, videos) that can inspire for action and help understand the theoretical concept of each of the five the modules of the training:

1. Promoting cooperation among teachers;
2. Creative ways of teaching and learning;
3. Pedagogically conscious creation and use of resources and materials,
4. Developing a learner-centred indoor and outdoor environment,
5. Engagement and motivation of learners, teachers and parents for innovation.

Module tasks on the online training (various activities, writing tasks, discussions based on teaching experiences and the literature) have been transformed into self-reflective tasks and recommendations to discuss topics in the handbook users’ own environment.

An impressive collection of inspiring local projects and creative initiatives can be read in the last chapter of the Teachers’ Handbook. The follow-up projects can provide useful inspiration for all teachers who would like to work on developing the following important areas of everyday creativity: empowering and increasing the autonomy of students and highlighting their roles in the educational process, community building, cooperation between students and teachers, differentiation, improving students’ critical thinking, learning by doing, rethinking of the use of learning spaces, improving self-reflection and self-knowledge, raising students’ curiosity and creativity and motivation, re-interpreting the role of teachers as facilitators.