As May is coming to an end, so is our project. To conclude it, we’ve made some materials that represent what we’ve learned through this semester of exploring vocational education systems in countries of participating schools. These final products are made of: our suggestions on how to fix weak spots, combined SWOT analyses that sum up good and bad sides of vocational programs and schools that conduct them, as well as final storybook that gathers the most important materials made during the project.
Our students, guided by their dedicated teachers, have studied for the past few months vocational programs they are enrolled in by analyzing them through SWOT matrix. Conducted analyses brought us many useful conclusions: things that we are good at and opportunities that lay around us – both we should stick to and use them, along with our imperfections and external threats that we should take a care about so they don’t affect our work in negative manner. During the process, we also had to do some hands-on work and come up with solutions that could spare us from the latter.
All of that you can find among our final products. They represent hard work of our students and patience our teachers have invested in order to give students tools for thinking and creating all of the useful digital content. We are proud of them and we congratulate them on everything they accomplished.
Suggested solutions
About suggested solutions we already wrote in two different occasions. The first one was when students made list of ideas how to tackle their schools’ weaknesses (CLICK HERE), while the second occasion was when they had to figure out how to neutralize threats to quality function of their schools (CLICK HERE).
One thing that is mutual for both groups of problems is that schools will, to some extent, need help of their communities and official representatives. Depending on nature of a problem, some solutions would have to include local officials, while others would have to aim for reaching out to state government and changes in national laws and regulations.
Combined SWOT analyses
To remind you, participating schools in this project are from Turkey, Romania and Croatia. Our aim was to find out what could be done better in organizing and implementing vocational programs in European schools. It is not an easy nor small task to do, but we tried to paint a bigger picture by combining our analyses. We asked our students to use their SWOT analyses and divide written bullet points in three different matrixes. That way we got three different documents that to some extent sum up what is good and what is wrong with vocational educational systems in these three different European countries. You can find them on the following links or read more in pictures shared below.
SWOT VET Storybook
This storybook is made via Storyjumper, online tool for creating digital books. It gathers the most important materials made during this project. Some of them you probably already saw in our previous articles, but still, here they are – presented on one place, making one logical sequence that lists proc, cons and solutions, each chapter dedicated to its own school.
We hope you will enjoy it and, what is more important, find it useful by learning something about vocational education and sparking an interest for it.
