Battling negativity in the classroom to reduce early school leaving

Today is more than important to work on factors that can help preventing and managing Early School Leaving and conflicts. This is the aim of this training course which topic is every day more and more crucial even if there are no easy answers. With a holistic approach in mind, during the course, the participants will learn how to identify the causes of this phenomenon, the best approaches and strategies to prevent, tackle and reduce it, and the keys to conflict management.

The new edition of the course “Preventing conflicts and tackling Early School Leaving” took place in Bologna from 10/07/2022 to 15/07/2022. The participants came from all across Europe, with Øystein Førsvoll from Norway; Enuș Ionela Nicoleta and Iorga Marinela Monica from Romania; Miroslava Angelova Petrova, Zornitsa Nikolova Marinova and Milena Aleksandrova Trendafilova from Bulgaria; Soultos Leonidas, Chaspari Maria Sofia, Anastasiou Maria and Boutsi Paraskevi from Greece; Eleni Ioannou Lordou, Spyros Kouloumis and Christos Papachristodoulou from Cyprus. 

Early school leaving is a widespread problem across Europe and being in a European context, participants got the chance to explore different perspectives at the national level. On the first day, they focused on defining what Early School Leaving means and on identifying the main risk factors. This allowed the participants to draw and share a realistic picture of their school experience with Early School Leaving, starting with the underlying causes, and finishing with the potential consequences. We also understand that education is our weapon to change our society and future. 

We started from the assumption that in order to develop an early school leaving approach, we deeply need to connect to our students, being emphatic, to be closer to their interests and their feelings. We engaged in hands-on activities to learn about the importance of active listening and emotional intelligence in creating social connections. 

The participants went on discovering the conflict management topic. First, we dedicated some time for a perspective change. With the support of an inspirational TED Talk, the group who initially associated the idea of conflict with something essentially negative, realized afterward how conflicts provided in their life unique opportunities to improve their relationship, communication, and understanding. We also discussed how to manage a conflict and its several styles. 

Afterward the group practiced some non-formal activities to reflect the importance of membership and collaboration. Strategies for collaborative work and peer-education were analyzed. Thanks to many funny games we fully understood the concept, and moreover, once back at home, we can play them with our students.   

The group focused on and discussed how and teach to students to have a mindset of growth. Then the group defined and characterized the main “negative” student types and developed practical tips and suggestions on how to deal with them in the most effective ways. We analyzed through visual tasks and group reflection the phenomenon of bullying and possible strategies to become upstanders and stop bullying.The group focused then on how to battle negativity in the classroom and false believes, through group reflection and practical activities. We analyzed different conflict management styles and discussed their concrete application in different situations.

​During the week we learned how to use many tools to create engaging activities: Socrative, Bamboozle, Mentimeter, Quizlet.

The key word of this week’s training course was “transformation”: we learned how to change perspective on conflicts, how to transform the strong and sometimes negative energy of some students into something positive and productive, and how to change our mindset from fixed to growth, how to transform a group of people into a team.

Discover more about this course on our website:
​https://www.erasmustrainingcourses.com/early-school-leaving.html