DIVERSASIA - Best practices

Sophie-Scholl-School is an inclusive school for all children located in Gieben, Germany. Currently about 260 children attend this school. They work in 12 groups at different age levels. Classes are built across two grades. Up to 22 children attend each class and five of them usually have special needs. There are two teachers per class during the lessons. They choose working methods which have been tailored to every single child. They have designed topics and subjects in such a way that all children can participate in class. A day in school is divided into several phases of work and leisure. The rhythm of the day is visualized by pictures on the black board. For several periods each day they work with the “weekly plan” or, “plan for the day”. They use this instrument so that every child can do his or her work on an individual level. Using the “plan” as the same instrument for all children is the chosen method for them. Within this frame everyone has working-time and has an individual workload and timing. Another possibility in class is working on the same topic but with different tasks. Working in this way, firstly everyone of the class meets and the teacher summarizes the topic on which the class is going to work on. The pupils then ask questions and try to find interesting subtopics which they would like to study. They also think about the methods with which they can get results for their questions. The ideas of the children contain experiments as well as reading and reproducing texts or the creative treatment of the topic (like building a model) up to useful training of a special tool. The different tasks have to be discussed with the teacher if they are invented by the children. Other tasks are instructions given by the teacher directly. If you have many different tasks concerning one topic it is very important to finally reimport results and working methods into the group. This is the reason why presentations are of very high interest. Class teams meet once a week to reflect on the work and make a plan for the next stage. Teachers visit each other in class to reflect on development or setbacks. Doing so they can learn from each other’s experience for the benefit of all. If a problem persists they ask the school principle to have a look at the situation, because she knows how to train teachers. Since the school has multi professional teams in every class, they can take various different viewpoints on the issues. In team meetings and special instruction meetings they discuss and try to develop new ideas.