Happier Students

The Early School Leaving and Bullying phenomenon are ones of the main challenges that all
European educational system have to deal with.It is known that bullying is one of the reasons causing
ESL.One of the five headline targets of European 2020 strategy is to reduce the ESL rate to less than
10% by 2020.
All key persons of this project cooperated for ERASMUS+ Project(Cycling Against Bullying /2016-
TR01-KA219-034225) to reduce bullying at high school.In 5th TM of our previous project we all
discussed our results of all data including surveys,peer view forms and teachers’ observations and
we decided that bullying at schools can be reduced while two target groups(victim and bullies) are
brought for the same goal such as club activities.Especially bullies can be more enthusiastic and
compatible to attend outdoor activities than lessons in classroom. Moreover, our observation showed
us that students who have difficulty in adapting the class environment need to be approached more
patiently and comprehensively. During the previous project we worked with bullies called “trouble
makers” by other teachers attending their classes and school administration. These students could
fulfill all his responsibilities both club and dissemination activities successfully by getting along with
all friends. However,it was observed that they failed to adapt to the classroom environment and
disrupted the lessons.They had difficulties in communicating with traditionalist,strict and impatient
teachers.Therefore,They had a lot of problems with these teachers and they were on the verge of
dropping out the school. We found out ESL based on bullying problems and not only bullies but also
teachers should be trained to reduce ESL.According to studies of our school counselor service,
students with ESL risk complain that not only their teachers don’t listen to them to express
themselves but also teachers use boring course methods. On the other hand their teachers complain
that these students behave rudely and they can’t pay attention to the lessons. The objectives of LTT
activities are identified according to the teachers’ the highest three complaints about students to the
counselor service:
• Disrupting the course in the class environment
• Using mobile phones during the lessons
• Students’ being rudeness and not obeying school rules
Thanks to our project LTT, our target teacher group will cope with these problems by creating their
solutions without complaining about them. The objectives of this project have been determined in the
article of European Commission Education & Training 2020 Schools Policy “Whole school approach
to tackling early school leaving Policy messages” and also the three-year concrete goals of the 2023
Education Vision of Turkish Republic Ministry of Education:
* Turning schools into a life space where children happily take part by creating relaxing and
enjoyable areas at schools for our students
* Rising the sense of professional satisfaction of teachers and school administrators
* Providing the teachers will be able to use personalized,flexible,modular experience-oriented course
materials to awake their students with risk of ESL curiosity and provide their attending the course by
developing their 21st century soft skills
* Encouraging the teachers will take into consideration of differences in their students who have
different learning types.
Stress Room will be formed in an appropriate area in our schools to have relax and spend time with
their teachers playing smart games and chatting like friends.The Rabbit Hole Box will be formed near
the counselor’s room to be put papers with their problems which they are shy to share with someone
orally. The Group Therapy will be held by the counselor service and they will study with the students
at risk of ESL for anger management, empathy techniques and target setting.Surveys and peer view
forms will be applied to participants after each activity. All interviews and papers from the Rabbit
Hole Box will be reported as cases to study for LTTs. For improvement of the project participants, we
will measure the number of teachers who have improved their 21st century soft skills in the area of
Project objectives. This will be evaluated using the pretest-posttest method,in which online surveys
will be conducted before and after each LTT event among its participants.We will cooperate with the
District Directorate of National Education to reach all teachers in our region to inform and encourage
them to join our dissemination activities; the Knowledge and The Course Material
Competitions,eTwinning seminaries etc.The Enjoyable Course Material Book with ISBN will be
prepared by cooperating with partners and local teachers and applied for being published by the
Head Council of Education and Moralty(Talim Terbiye Kurulu Başkanlığı) in order to reach more
teachers and have our booklet earned national and international value.