Educational innovations often tend to fail, mainly because teachers and school principals do not feel involved or are not allowed to have a say. Angela de Jong's dissertation shows the importance of school principals and teachers leading 'collaborative innovation' together. Collaborative innovation requires a collaborative, distributed approach involving both horizontal and vertical working relationships in a school. Her research shows that teams with more distributed leadership have a more collaborative 'spirit' to improve education. Team members move beyond formal (leadership) roles, and work more collectively on school-wide educational improvement from intrinsic motivation. De Jong further shows that school principals seek a balance in steering and providing space. She distinguished three leadership patterns: Team Player, Key Player, Facilitator. Team players in particular are important for more collaborative innovation in a school. They balance between providing professional space to teachers (who look beyond their own classroom) and steering for strategy, frameworks, boundaries, and vision. This research took place in schools working with the program of Foundation leerKRACHT, a program implemented by more than a thousand schools (primary, secondary, and vocational education). The study recommends, towards school principals and teachers, and also towards trainers, policymakers, and school board members, to reflect more explicitly on their roles in collaborative innovation and talk about those roles.
From September 2024 onwards we will start the development of an educational innovation for Dutch primary schools to design a dynamic school day (a school day in which sedentary learning is regularly interrupted by moments of physical activity) for their local context. A number of Dutch primary schools already successfully implemented a more dynamic school day. In this qualitative study, we set out to assess the facilitators and barriers that several stakeholders faced during the implementation of the dynamic school day. We also set out to assess preferences of pupils with respect to a more dynamic school day. In preparation of the development phase, we will conduct semi-structured interviews with stakeholders of 3 Dutch primary schools (spring 2024). The interview guide will be based on the MRC guideline for conducting process evaluations of complex interventions. For each school, we seek to include: 1) the physical education teacher, 2) a classroom teacher who finds it easy to organize physical activities during the school day, 3) a classroom teacher who finds it difficult to organize physical activities during the school day, 4) a member of the management team. If relevant, we will also interview other stakeholders involved in the implementation of the dynamic school day. We will present the factors that may facilitate or hinder the implementation of a dynamic school day in the Dutch context. We will use these results to develop a set of potential implementation strategies that can serve as a source of inspiration for other Dutch primary schools in their process to develop a dynamic school day for their local context.
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17-06-2024Introduction: Youth activity guideline compliance is generally low across most western countries and Dutch youth are no exception to this. Thirty-two percent of 4-11 year old boys and girls, and 15% of 12-17 year olds are currently meeting the physical activity (PA) guideline recommendations of one hour of daily moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) (Hildebrandt, Ooijendijk, & Hopman Rock, 2008). Physical education (PE) has been attributed an important role in providing young people with physical activity (Kahn, et al., 2002). If sufficiently active, PE lessons could contribute to physical activity levels in youth. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the overall intensity of Dutch primary and secondary school physical education (PE) lessons and the influence of various lesson characteristics on these intensity levels. Methods: Heart rates were measured using the Polar Team System in a nationally distributed sample of 913 students in 40 schools (20 primary schools and 20 secondary schools) in the Netherlands. A total of 106 lessons were assessed, with 10 students per class (5 boys and 5 girls) wearing a heart rate monitor for the duration of their PE class. Teachers were asked not to deviate from their regular PE program and to carry out their lessons as they had planned. None of the lessons had a specifically planned physical activity intensity focus. Results: Overall percentages lesson time in MVPA were 46.7% and 40.1% during primary school and secondary school PE respectively. Primary school students engaged in significantly more MVPA than did secondary school students (t (890) = 4.635, p<.001). Furthermore, results indicated a sharp decline in girls' PE intensity levels in secondary school, where boys were more active than girls (F (1,912) = 9,58, p<.01). Subsequent analyses of lesson content in secondary school students indicated that girls were less active during teamgames, but not during individual activities or lessons with a mixed subject (both teamgames and individual activities) (45.7% vs. 34.7% F (3,451) = 16.31, p<.001, figure 1). Discussion: Our results show that one PE lesson roughly accounts for one-third of the daily amount of physical activity as prescribed by activity guidelines. Furthermore, previous research has shown that by including lesson intensity as an additional lesson goal it is relatively simple to increase lesson intensity (Verstraete, Cardon, De Clercq, & De Bourdeaudhuij, 2007). Therefore, increasing lesson intensity combined with increasing the number of weekly PE lessons seems an effective strategy to increase youth physical activity through PE. However, given the curricular and time constraints in most schools, PE should not be seen as a stand-alone solution for combating inactivity. Combined with other school-based PA opportunities (active transport, active breaks) however, PE could make a meaningful contribution to daily PA in youth. Finally, the high prevalence of coeducational teamgames (61% of all lessons) in the Dutch secondary school PE curricula might prevent girls from attaining similar physical activity levels to boys during PE. Therefore, more research is needed on maximising secondary school girls' participation during teamgames.
CRYPTOPOLIS is a project supported by EU which focuses on the financial management knowledge of teachers and the emerging field of risk management and risk analysis of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency has shown to be a vital and rapidly growing component in today’s digital economy therefore there is a need to include not just financial but also crypto literacy into the schools. Beside multiple investors and traders the market is attracting an increasing number of young individuals, viewing it as an easy way to make money. A large pool of teenagers and young adults want to hop on this train, but a lack of cryptocurrency literacy, as well as financial literacy in general amongst youth, together with their inexperience with investing makes them even more vulnerable to an already high-risk investment.Therefore, we aim to increase the capacity and readiness of secondary schools and higher educational institutions to manage an effective shift towards digital education in the field of crypto and financial literacy. The project will develop the purposeful use of digital technologies in financial and crypto education for teaching, learning, assessment and engagement.
