ESTONIA

Tartu Kesklinna School is a basic school (grades from 1 to 9). The total number of students is 509. There are 35 teachers and 15 other people (the headmaster and the vice headmaster included) working in our school. Three of the teachers are special education teachers. Tartu Kesklinna School is situated in southern Estonia, 220 km south-east of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Tartu is the second biggest town and the culture capital of Estonia. Kesklinna School is not an experienced organization in international activities. We have only had one international project and it was the Comenius project “LEADERS - Leaders in Europe aiming to develop, evaluate and review their schools” form 2005-2008. Now we are really eager to join this new project as it supports our curriculum and schools` developmental plans. We would like to increase the quality of teaching through the cooperation with different associations as integrating local associations into school activities can increase students' school motivation. This can also give us a change to develop new teaching methods and we hope that this will lead to better learning results. The international cooperation gives us the possibility to exchange good practices among different countries. Developing new ways to teach participation and civic skills would prepare our school for the globalization better. As we have not had much experience with different ethnic groups so far we would like to learn from the best practices of our partners to be better prepared for challenges in the future. The key people of charge would be the ones who lead the Comenius project, Kristi Paju (English teacher) and Andra Kalda (history and social studies teacher). In case one of them leaves her post the other one will go on and find another teacher from our school because there are several active and cooperative teachers who love challenges. In recent PISA test results, Estonian schools were ranked high. Our school will share especially pedagogiacal know-how within the partnership. At the moment we are really concentrated on developing our students` social skills and digital competences. Other important competencies are: value competence, self-management competence, learning to learn competence, mathematics competence, entrepreneurship competence.