The first year press release is out

Introducing LOOP: A project for empowering teachers personal, professional and social continuous development through innovative peer-induction programmes

LOOP is a policy experimentation project that aims to contribute to the shift towards a comprehensive teaching profession policy that spans all stages of the teachers’ professional careers namely by:

  • Structuring a peer-learning induction programme based on mentoring, to support the initiation of the teaching profession and adapting to a new workplace culture.
  • Creating a mentors’ programme for the development of competences to guide and support new teachers during the implementation of the induction programme.
  • Testing and validating the induction and mentoring programmes in the schools of the LOOP network.
  • Preparing policy recommendations for the integration of induction and mentoring programmes into the national policies and frameworks of teachers’ continuous professional development.

LOOPs implementation started in March 2020 under the coordination of INOVA+ from Portugal and the Directorate General School Management (Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science For the development of the results, 3 Public authorities in the educational sector, along with 6 Universities and 4 research Organisations  from 7 European countries (Portugal, Spain, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Germany) are collaborating to contribute to improving teaching careers paths, in terms of rethinking career structure and guidance and also how to empower teachers to better navigate throughout the career system, creating opportunities to promote excellence in teaching at all levels, by continuing to support the professional development, causing an increase in the quality of the profession and the level of attractiveness.

Last year was dedicated to the immersion into the project topics through a detailed research phase of nearly 10 months that included desk research and fieldwork such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups with school leaders and teachers (experience and recent). Around 850 participants from the 7 countries have been involved in the identification of their needs for better personal, professional and social development. The background analysis complemented  with a catalogue of good practices will be soon available on our website and will prepare the soil for the development of the induction and mentoring programmes. 

The preliminary results of the desk and field research were presented in the second transnational project meeting (14th- 15th of December 2021) hosted by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. The meeting was the first to be held face to face and the partners actually met each other after 10 months of working on this project. 

During the meeting a Policy Matching Workshop took place with the participation of representatives of the public authorities from Portugal, Slovenia, Greece, Spain, Croatia, and Italy and two Teachers Word Café were organised, one with Portuguese teachers online and one with Slovenian Teachers, focusing on how the induction programmes can be adopted and put in practice. 

We invite you to take part in the LOOP project and be a member of our Network, which already counts over 100 members in Europe. Our members will have the opportunity to take part in the field research activities, in the co-design sessions for the teachers’ induction programme and the mentors’ capacitation programme and participate in the field trials experimentation phase acting as first users of the new policy tools for teachers’ career.

Join our network by submitting a registration form here and be a driver for the transformation of the teaching profession and its policy for all stages of the teaching career.  

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