The European Primary Physical Education Teacher Program (EPRIME) project sees a need and opportunity to help teachers to reimagine their PE lessons and PA offering at pre-school and primary school levels. With it, we seek to improve the quality of PE and the promotion of an active andhealthy lifestyle from an early age across Europe.To reach this goal, 6 partners from 5 countries with 1 European network develop a teachers’ education program that empowers to better impact on the motor skills and psycho-social development of 4-to-7-year-old pupils. Plus, we provide applicable resources that supportawareness-raising initiatives to better include children, parents, sport coaches and other stakeholders in our learning objectives.In order to ensure that the educational program is in line with the wishes and needs of the teachers we organized focus group sessions in the different partner countries, and set out to identify challenges and weak points at personal, organizational and system levels. Furthermore, we identified good practices within the different partner countries to use as assets for the EPRIMEproject.The results of the focus group sessions were categorized into four main themes, factors associated with (1) the teacher, (2) the PE class, (3) other stakeholders, (4) practical considerations.
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This research evaluates how Project-Based Learning (PBL) is implemented in the Innovative Design program that is taught at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. This paper offers insights about the way students and teachers experience PBL within this program, and how the implementation can be improved according to previous research in this field. By studying relevant literature, a list of important (organizational and didactical) factors regarding the implementation of PBL is created. Questionnaires investigating these factors are then circulated among the teachers and students of the program. The results of the questionnaires are analyzed against guidelines provided in the literature. Based on this comparison, recommendations for the improvement of the PBL approach within the program are provided. The analysis shows that the program offers meaningful projects, and the students are properly prepared to collaborate. Nevertheless, the analysis also shows that the program still has room for improvement. The assessment methods are still unrefined, the students experience time-pressure while working on their projects, and the teachers can benefit from additional training to be better prepared for teaching in a PBL environment. Fortunately, the teachers indicate willingness to learn new PBL specific teaching skills. https://nl.linkedin.com/in/haniers
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The field of higher professional educational in the Netherlands is undergoing drastic structural changes. Organizational-wide mergers are commonplace and are often followed by development of new curricula. Furthermore, this is often accompanied by the implementation of a completely new educational concept as well. These structural changes in the educational system require that teachers adapt their current teaching practices, along with working on gaining new competences associated with working in a changing organization. This paper presents a short background of communities of practice in higher education, followed by a report on the first impressions from an experiment in which a bottom-up style of change management has been implemented through the use of a community of practice. A community of practice (CoP) is a powerful knowledge management tool that brings people from a similar domain together in order to solve complex problems, deal with a changing organization and build knowledge around a specific practice. Inholland decided to implement a CoP for the international faculty in order for the members to better cope with the major curricula and didactic changes currently being implemented there. Concepts such as change, organizational sense making and teacher professionalization
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