As the Erasmus coordinator at my school the AIC, I couldn’t do without this novel experience to try myself to teach at another EU high school. I picked a partner school with which we have been in close cooperation with over the last 3 years, ever since we started our Erasmus programmes at AIC.

Beside being the principal, I am also a Biology teacher, so I took advantage of both and planned my activities at the Istituto Omnicomprensivo Dante Alighierei accordingly. I knew the school itself as I have taken and sent groups of students for Avicenna and also colleagues for JS, and we also received 4 groups of students and Job shadowing colleagues from there plus 2 students to study at us for one semester.

I managed to pull off a very busy and useful week academically and culturally alike. The first day I shadowed the principal of the school, meaning that after a short tour in the administrative offices we sat down in his office where he explained the daily responsibilities and legal duties and all the paperwork of a regular Italian state school principal, Even though we are a private school, I learned a lot about the bureaucratic burdens and the immense about of red tape, about the urge of registering everything and waiting for authorisation usually for weeks. In terms of managing the school, he keeps a distance from the staff, actually he sits in a separate building which is dedicated to administrative departments, having another director who is responsible for the finances. We talk about a state school of about 1200 students coming from all over the place, from surrounding little villages and small towns, only 30 % of all students actually live in Nocera Umbra, which is a very elegant and nature-close small hilltop town itself as well. The living standards, quality of life is relatively high and there is lower than average air pollution in this city making it an ideal place to wander out in the forest in the good air.

The problems the leadership face is very similar to ours, they have to manage the growing number of absences and poor discipline and study moral, meeting with a parent for disciplinary matters is of a daily occurrence.

The following days I held Biology lessons for a mixed audience in English because my visit also coincided with the presence of the German partner school from Murnau, Bavaria. My lessons were also used the mark the beginning of the English spoken subjects at the school as the school decided to introduce subjects in English, to follow the Cambridge curriculum in certain subjects ( on top of the current , Italian one) and Biology is one of them, so I received plenty of interest and my lessons were packed and also registered to further use.

I also took the advantage of being there and I observed local colleagues teaching Biology and took part in lab sessions that are better equipped than ours. Then we held regular discussions on exchanging good practices and explore the differences between our teaching methods and results of it.

I also took part in a water management discussion panel at the university of Perugia with local politicians, as an environmentally important issue, and that was interesting and very inspiring hearing about mega investments into the water management sector. I could also contact another school in another city Lodi and sit down with the principal for further cooperation between our schools, since we received 5 students from them for half a year and that was an experience for a lifetime for them as well as for us at AIC.

In most of the afternoons, as school finishes at 1pm and students go home for lunch and rarely come back for the afternoon as they have lessons only once a week, I went out to discover nearby Umbrian cities with my friend the Erasmus coordinator of the host school. We spent the evenings also together with the German colleagues and the weather was turning more and more pleasant due the arrival of the spring.

This experience was very enriching and stimulating, so much so that I recommended it to other colleagues as well.

This mobility was fully funded by the European Commission.

Written by: Steve Szabó

23. March. 2024.