Conflict Management, Emotional Intelligence and Bullying Prevention

11-16 July Florence, Tuscany

Szabó Steve

I took part in this programme as the first mobility of our second Erasmus project involving 7 teachers and 2 groups of students at my international high school Avicenna IC in Budapest, called:

Building bridges between EU schools to provide opportunities for our pupils of today and tomorrow.

I chose Europass Teacher Academy as a course provider based on my earlier positive experience with them. Recently, in the post-Covid era they embarked on a massive expansion setting up Study Centres and Studios all over Europe with Florence as their headquarter. They have a rather well evolved management structure and a marketing and training programme development team in place. They are very busy in the online space and offer about 700 courses for teachers in 27 locations. They partnered up for example with Szent István University from Hungary too.

They work with travel agencies for Saturday cultural and tour options. We took a Tuscany in one Day bus tour, and it wasn’t far from the truth. We left Florence at 8 am and got back at 9pm having visited other regional cities of excellence such as Siena (famous for its horse race called Palio), San Gimignano (famous for its 7 towers) and Pisa (famous for the leaning tower). We also went to wine tasting in a canteen in Poggio dei Laghi village situated in the world-famous Chianti wine region.

This was my second time with them in Florence, in the city of unparalleled natural and manmade beauty and richness, known and admired for its art, architecture and sculpture but also for its leather and parfum shops.

This time we were in a different location that also belongs to Europass, in via dei  Rustici. The classrooms inside this three-story inner-city building are spacious, giving place to a maximum of 15 people and many of the courses were overbooked due to high demand. It means that we were split into a 14 and a 10-member group. My group was the smaller one with 3 Portuguese pre-school teachers, 5 Croatian teaching staff from a culinary and catering vocational school in Pula, Istria. One German colleague could not make it due to the travel chaos hitting German airports in the run up to the summer holiday season, so we were 9 in a classroom with our teacher trainer, Levente from Hungary.

The training itself span over the week, from 9 am to 2 pm from Monday to Friday and the last day, Saturday was dedicated to the cultural round tour in the picturesque region of Tuscany.

The training started with the usual ice breaking activities based on questions to get to know each other better and to create a certain level of cohesion between the participants. Then, we were given workbooks to work from whereas the teacher used his ppts projected to the overhead TV screen.  

We began the course by making sense of the main topic, conflicts that can arise between students in the classroom, and also between parents, teachers, and administrative staff and talked about the possible sources of conflict (Gray and Stark, 1984):

• Limited resources
• Interdependent work activities
• Differentiation of activities
• Communication problems
• Differences in perceptions
• The environment of the organisation.

The types of conflict can be affective-emotional, cognitive- opinion based, behavioural- actions based, goal conflict of different outcomes and the interrelated conflicts which are all of these together.  As a natural outcome of this part we talked about conflict resolution strategies such as negotiation and mediation. Mediation involves a 3^rd person, negotiation on the other hand should respond to three objectives:

• Identification of differences between the parties
• Making joint decisions
• Building a commitment to resolve the conflict

When resolving a given conflict we are advised to focus on the problem, not on the personalities involved. One should be courteous but without sugar coating the problem. It is also important to keep our conversations or decisions strictly confidential and come up with a resolution together with the participants. We also talked about building and strengthening relationships with our students to be able to act quicker in either preventing or resolving conflicts with more success. Skilfully practiced active listening can also be a great help, so we conducted exercises in pairs how to maintain eye contact, be attentive, patient, keeping an open mind without interrupting the other person.

The other main topic up for discussion was bullying in the school. At this point it is important to differentiate about teasing and bullying. In teasing for example, the target doesn’t mind it, or it is reciprocal and done for fun by definition. In bullying the target feels badly or embarrassed to say the least, and it is intended to cause harm. We carried out exercises in the workbook to recognise early signs of it such as Verbal, Relational, Physical, Cyber and Sexual in nature. We learned how to identify warning signs indicating that someone is being bullied or somebody is becoming a bully. We also discussed the possible reasons of bullying specifically in our school types (high school, vocational school, pre-school) and the forms of cyberbullying. In this latter the role of the school and teachers is inevitable to prevent cliques in our classroom and build community spirit instead to have cooperative vs competitive classrooms. Finally, we defined the members of the bullying circle: possible defenders, supporters, bystanders, defenders, bullies and targets.

On Friday, before receiving our course certificates we were given a closing task to design anti-bullying posters and present them that we could use in our school as well.

I have to emphasise the outstanding importance of the support of the European Commission who has funded this mobility through Erasmus+, for which I am truly grateful.

This mobility was funded by the European Commission.

The information presented here does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

Here you can find our ever-expanding Erasmus page on our Avicenna website:  https://avicenna.hu/erasmus/

2021-22 Erasmus project title:

Building a network in the field of education within the EU

Europass Course:

Soft Skills for Strong Teachers

sharing my experience

Steve Szabó

 Florence 4-9 April 2022

Our nine-month long 2021-22 Erasmus project called Building a network in the field of education within the EU, has come to an end with this third mobility taking place in the magnificent Tuscan regional capital Florence, famous for its Renaissance vibe and architecture.

Representing the Avicenna International College from Budapest, I took part in a six-day programme with the Europass Teacher Academy under the title: Soft skills for strong teachers by our very sympathetic and enthusiastic teacher trainer Cristina Salvatori.

I was the only male in the 14-member strong classroom of teaching colleagues from eight different European countries. Interestingly, there was one English lady as well, remnant of a pre-Brexit programme postponed for the Covid crisis, making it a truly unique, vintage ensemble of teachers.

The course was scheduled for every weekday from 9 am to 2pm with two coffee breaks and started on Monday morning. We had icebreaking activities on the first day, which meant having to introduce ourselves and our schools and teaching environments in general where we also exchanged good practices. About 80% of the participants came from elementary school and only 20% from high school, two of them from vocational school.

On the second day we were introduced to an app called GooseChase which is an excellent team building tool that can increase student engagement and enhance learning by getting them explore, discover and learn actively. This tool takes the traditional scavenger hunt to a new level. To learn and use it, we were separated in three groups and sent out into the city following the instructions and completing the tasks set by our teacher in 90 minutes of time. It helped us socialize better and also get to know the city and getting in touch with the locals.

On Tuesday afternoon we started the soft skills training that went on until Friday afternoon. Hard skills, also known as academic knowledge and know-how, are often the direct and only focus of our education system. To complement and shake it up a bit, soft skills are more and more on demand by the workplaces and the labour market, therefore it is worth investing into these interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities, as we came to know them in more depth during our Erasmus training at Europass.

So, we were introduced to:

• Effective communication methods in the classroom,
• Discussed the forms and advantages and disadvantages of groupwork
• The strategies we often use to effectively manage groupwork
• Workload sharing and motivation to increase student’s retention rate
• How to write a professional personal statement
• Ed puzzle and Ted-ed platforms to create video
• Theories of creativity, the Reggio Emilia approach
• Pre-schooling advances
• Dangers of confirmation bias

In the last day, we had to device a lesson plan with the aforementioned soft skills integrated into it and discuss it in small groups.

The real gem of our stay in Florence were the extra-curricular, cultural activities. We were given one afternoon, after the classes to tour Florence with a guide introducing us to known and also unknown treasures of this marvellous, jaw-dropping city, to its natural and man-made architectural beauties, the stories that shaped the past and present of the Tuscan capital.

On the last day, day six, Saturday, we went on a Day Tour discovering Tuscany by bus. We left Florence at 8am and returned at 8pm which gave us an indescribably mesmerising insight into how beautiful Tuscany really is. The touring of the Tuscan landscape was interrupted only to visit fabulous cities of the region such as Pisa, San Gimignano, Siena and on the way back we stopped for a very welcoming wine tasting in the Chianti wine region. That day made our day, in sense of experiencing all the beauties this region can give us.

It was an absolutely beautiful and fulfilling experience, I can only recommend it to anyone.

I was very satisfied with the management, having looked at it from an eye of a manager. The time keeping, being always on schedule, the due and reliable communication and the academic as well as the cultural activity management, the levels of organisation, the attention paid to the students and the details, ‘sono andate ben oltre le mie aspettative’, i.e., exceeded my expectations.

I have to emphasise the outstanding importance of the support of the European Commission who has funded this mobility through Erasmus+, for which I am truly grateful. 

This mobility was funded by the European Commission.

The information presented here does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

From the Avicenna International College (AIC) in Budapest I took part in an Erasmus short term mobility course in the Eternal City in the first week of December 2021 as part of our project called Building a network in the field of education within the EU.

The name of the course organised by our host Alessandro Gariano from Enjoy Italy was: Cultural Heritage Education and Storytelling. I took this opportunity for a variety of reasons, mainly to acquire novel approaches to education in the 21^st century, to get the chance to meet international colleagues for future cooperation to then organise a range of joint activities together and last but not least for the unparalleled splendour this City, Rome has to offer.

From a strictly managerial point of view, certainly there were a few flops and gaps to fill, technological aspects (repeated internet blackouts in the class) to improve but all in all I can say that it was a fulfilling experience to remember for years to come. I can only recommend this course to anyone interested.

Our class had 26 colleagues, the majority of them came from elementary school and about 35% of us came from a high school. The nationality make-up of our class was a mixed bag of mainly Spanish (Alicante, Alcantara, Andalucía) teachers and the rest of us came from Portugal, Greece, Poland, with two colleagues from Germany and myself from Hungary. Among them all, I could liaise with the Spanish the best, as we have quickly found a common voice and spent much of our time together.

The classes were held from 9am to 2.30pm from Monday to Friday. On the first day the 10 different schools introduced themselves with demo materials highlighting their cities as a tourist attraction and also describing the profile of their institutions, giving out gift packages. I introduced Budapest in pictures and in a mini video followed by the introduction of the educational culture at my high school the AIC.

In the next four days we have learnt about visual education, the European Skills Agenda, the Digital Education Agenda and the flipped classroom approach.  We have also covered a range of ICT apps as we explored a handful of digital classroom managing systems.  Among these, we were introduced to Edmodo, Blendspace, Nearpod, Edshelf, Padlet and Coggle. What I have found the most useful tool to use in my classes back at home was the Blendspace multimedia creator to make rich content cutting edge videos to capture the attention and the imagination of my students when teaching them the usual material in Biology.  We had to create and present our very own video material and my choice was climate change as a burning topic for the classroom. The other equally useful digital tool from this end was Coggle which is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that helps you make sense of complex systems. My task was to draw up the structure of our education system with its branches at the AIC. I have already put it to good use to sketch out lesson plans.

What I was truly missing from the programme was a visit to a local high school for brainstorming activities with staff members, as it was originally part of the programme. Neither we had an introduction instead to the Italian educational system, which was a pity to miss.

What we had instead in the last day was a group activity called City Bingo. We had to go out to take pictures and interview locals on the street in the Prati district regarding typical pressing issues like the disastrous waste and garbage management in Rome to make and publish a video diary about.

The most memorable parts will definitely remain the joint activities, the cultural exchanges, the time spent together in a good company and the cultural walking tours in the historical centre of this eternally fascinating city that has an ancient church and a restaurant at every step of the way and a vibe and chemistry that leaves you ‘a mozzafiato’ or breathless.

I have to emphasise the outstanding importance of the support of the European Commission who has funded this mobility through Erasmus+ , for which I am truly grateful.

This mobility was funded by the European Commission.

The information presented here does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

Here you can find our ever-expanding Erasmus page on our Avicenna website:  https://avicenna.hu/erasmus/