TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Mateusz Górecki
The aim of the training was to raise participant’s awareness and highlight the importance of organizing and recognizing your own learning at large, either while working into an intercultural environment, either while working into your local community.
Specific goals were:
- To familiarize participants with the concept of Youth Pass as an educational program and its possibilities within and on the outside of Erasmus +
- To explore the 8 key competences
- To develop participant’s competences in planning NFE and intercultural learning with particular attention on building structured learning processes
- To set up strategies for the better recognition of youth work and non – formal education
- To share tools and methods in order to support young people self-learning and self-assessment
• Impact on the participants
The participants of this project coming from different countries will carry their knowledge and experiences to their own countries after the project. This will spread the aims of our project and increase our communication opportunities like reaching more young people around these countries.
The participants will be prepared to create and deliver trainings in the field of intercultural dialogue, human rights and entrepreneurship in an innovative way and with greater impact in youth development.
Activities like brainstorming, problem analysis, power analysis, teamwork events and games, will improve participant’s skills and experience in the field of non-formal education. Our partners, expert trainers, and facilitators will share their experiences with the other participants in order to achieve training goals during the project. They will be with them to help with anything they need during this period. These activities will lead them to design innovative teaching techniques.
The project will contribute to the development of non-formal education methods and instruments and thus encourage an active way of learning. The participants will gain the abilities of mutual thinking, and they will develop the skills of tolerance to different cultures and cooperation for a common purpose. In addition, they will become part of a larger community of youth workers, trainers, teachers, etc interested in experiential learning as a tool used to fighting unemployment.
• Impact on participating organizations
The internal capacities of the partner organizations will be strengthened, since they will include staff with skills and competences to deliver successful experiential trainings, and will have the necessary tools for generating new projects for the association. The project will also provide opportunities for networking and collaboration on joint initiatives for using experiential learning while participants are discussing topics like intercultural dialogue, human rights, entrepreneurship.
They will expand their market for offering consultancy services and paid trainings and this will also help towards their sustainability. Among the partner institutions, the project will generate a good exchange of experience and know how in the field of non-formal education and will increase the better use of English. The partner organizations capacity to organize itself and apply for future European financial resources will also be amplified.
The good communication and experience sharing of the partner NGOs’ will shape participants’ views for the international cooperation during the project. This will increase their willingness to participate in this kind of projects, and therefore the sense of responsibility will be increased. They will contribute to develop EU youth programs in the near future.
The group works, ice breaker activities, cultural fairs, and informal chat environments are created in order to set up better communication among project partners, partner NGOs, and participants. In doing so, intercultural communication will remove the cultural barriers, which is one of the main goals of the EU youth programs.
Based on non-formal methodology. Work in buzz/ small/ international groups, lectures, work in national groups, reflections, evaluations, brainstorming, intercultural evenings, informal moments, presentations, speed dating, etc.
Soft skills which we intended to train/empower:
- empowered mindset
- self-confidence and self awareness
- facilitating skills
- decision making
- diversity awareness
- creative and divergent thinking
- planning and scheduling
- willingness to learn
giving feedback and accept feedback
As the whole training was centered on Youthpass concept, there was special care for it. Participants were constantly monitoring their learning development (learning needs and assessment), through daily reflection in small groups they will move toward the final task: to describe non formal competencies.
Trainer, creating the main program, implementing activities