WISH Slovakia

Information about the school:

Súkromná stredná odborná škola Pro scholaris (Private vocational school Pro scholaris), as a high school in the Žilina region, is attended by 180 students from various social levels and backgrounds. The students come from different environments equipped with different learning habits. Some of those have serious problems with study not only because of neglecting home preparation but because of learning indispositions, like concentration problems, hyperactivity, etc.

Besides this kind of students, others are physically handicapped or have lingual problems. They all are threatened by social exclusion since their schoolmates often exclude them from collectives in many ways.

The school approaches actively in integrating these students to school system by special programmes like individual study programme, for instance. Other ways, how to include these students to education, comprise certain time bonuses for the handicapped or selecting other activities to reach the educational goals.

Ultimately, the school is capable to cope with this kind of student problems dealing with social exclusion by systematic approach covering:
1. continuous development of students at risk of social exclusion
2. individual teachers´ approach and constant support to these students compared to standard/common students
3. environment based on mutual tolerance and respect
4. security in the field of drug-free, bully-free and criminality-proof school background

The school has at its disposal actively operating Educational Advisor employed on full-time contract and co-operates with Special-Pedagogic and Psychological Consultancy Centre in the town.

For the first-year students, the school prepares a special course to facilitate the transition of students from primary to secondary school annually. This is accompanied by a series of events to make their high-school study easier at the very beginning.

Every student of the school is obliged to work-out a year project based on students´ own preferences in certain subjects and they develop their ICT skills and communication competences via this. Project-based learning is thus mentored by a subject teacher and students have a great opportunity to improve. Our school is involved in the regional contests aimed at creation of written works with the obligation to defend it in front of expert jury.

Responsibilities within the project:

– establishing communication, keeping partners informed, organising video-conferences
– moderating and facilitating the project meetings
– supervising the implementation of the project plan and effective use of budget
– organising a logo competition between partner schools with online voting
– editing and finalising the final collection and digital magazine of the students‘ SI projects
– integrating project outputs and outcomes to school curricula
– gathering all the project visual outputs, videos, photos in final DVD or in a digital form