Teacher Professional Development on Social Inclusion: The PLEIADE Approach

This paper presents some preliminary results of an intervention case-study intended to improve the ability of an international community of 75 teachers to design collaborative and inclusive activities for their students. The study is carried out in the framework of an Erasmus+ project adopting a long-term, participatory, and gamified approach to teachers’ professional development. This comprises a preparatory phase, followed by one-year training phase and a one-year enactment phase. During the training, the teachers design collaborative learning activities for inclusion, while during enactment they carry them out with their students. This paper focuses on the training phase, presenting the approach adopted and preliminary results in terms of its feasibility, discussing enabling factors and barriers to its application. Among enablers, the previous experience of the teachers, the careful and systematic design of the training, and the availability of motivated team leaders who coordinate the activities in their schools deserve being mentioned. Among the barriers, it should be noted that the pandemic situation preventing teachers’ mobility and the linguistic issues were an obstacle to straightforward peer interactions. Additionally, low familiarity with practice sharing behaviors and scarce digital competence hindered effective practice sharing.