PLATON - Promoting innovative Learning Approaches for the Teaching of Natural sciences)
The PLATON project combines student-centred methodologies such as inquiry-based learning, while promoting an innovative interdisciplinary model to address natural sciences.
PLATON aspires to provide teachers and school communities with a coherent teacher training framework, which will update their current teaching practices. More particularly, PLATON aims at offering an open and innovative training framework to teachers in primary and secondary education, which focuses on interdisciplinary and inquiry-based learning as well as collaboration among teachers of the same school unit. In this way, the project strengthens the profile of the teaching profession by providing teachers with the necessary training to master the use of inquiry-based learning in their everyday teaching practice. It also provides them with the necessary tools for involving students in interdisciplinary activities, in which meaningful learning occurs as they consciously and explicitly link their new knowledge to an existing knowledge structure.
Basic information
All the outputs of the project are subject to validation and implementation by the initial cluster of PLATON schools. The outcome of this experience is collected and reported in the “PLATON roadmap towards innovation”.
The main outputs foreseen for the first phase of the project are the following:
- Roadmap to inquiry - a user-friendly tool kit to introduce teachers to the methodology of inquiry-based learning.
- The construction of a “3D Interdisciplinary Map of Science Ideas” helping teachers make the links between past, present and future knowledge and the big ideas of science.
- Identification, adaptation and development of PLATON activities focusing on simulating real-life challenges.
- PLATON deep-science-learning assessment toolkit for teachers.
- The PLATON e-Agora - a space where teachers will find all the necessary tools and resources to engage in the project proposal.
- PLATON schools: a cluster of pilot schools that will engage in transforming traditional lectures into future hands-on and minds-on classrooms.