Collaborative and Reflective Environments (CaRE) in schools is an Erasmus+ project designed to foster cultures of community, collaboration, and reflection at all levels in schools.

This project included six schools and one university collaborating to explore CaRE might look like in schools in practice. 

We aimed to create a community of practice inside our schools and between our schools in order to learn to think in new ways about developing as professionals together via collaboration and reflection.

We explored how teachers and schools can support and enhance the development of collaborative and reflective environments in schools, and to develop resources for reflection at a whole-school level. One aim of the project was to establish a set of guidelines for teachers to collaborate, share good practice, discover creative approaches, and to critically evaluate and reflect together.

The CaRE project outlines a process to support change and reflection towards a common goal in a community of practice, including:

• Reflect to identify - Developing a common understanding of the issue and the overarching goal. What will it look like if we achieve our goal?

• Reflect to plan -Drafting a possible route towards your end goal. What should the next steps towards your goal be? What obstacles might you face, and how can they be overcome?

• Reflect on progress - Looking back to the reason why you thought this was a worthy area of focus. What brought you this point? How have things changed.

The project partners collaborated to explore CaRE might look like in schools in practice. The community of practice inside our schools and between our schools took place online and in person. The resources and tools included on this website detail the best practices that we discovered for CaRE in schools.

Partners included:

• Trinity Access Programmes, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

• Colegio Santa Elena, Spain

• BG/BRG Schwechat, Austria

• St. Dominic’s College, Ireland

• Gymnázium BESKYDY MOUNTAIN ACADEMY, Czech Republic

• Powiatowe Centrum Ksztalcenia Zawodowego i Ustawicznego w Wieliczce, Poland

• Portlaoise College, Ireland