As we know, collaborative European projects are very interesting platforms for the exchange of knowledge and best practices, as well as strong opportunities to understand why other approaches and solutions may benefit different circumstances. But as anyone who has taken part in such projects knows, the very same characteristics that create these exceptionally fertile circumstances, at times also make it particularly difficult to continuously and sustainably deliver high quality products. This is especially the case when partners are new to each other or to the Erasmus protocols, and the different focus points or expectations between partners reach the level where they overshadow the gains of the exchange and significantly slow down the planned process or systematically lower the quality of what is produced. However, it is paramount to safeguard the quality of the final products because, even though professional international exchange and strengthening one’s skills in collaboration are important goals indeed, the goal to deliver strong work, such that it may raise all our practices, always remains at the forefront of our aims.

Here we share our experience with monitoring the quality of an ongoing Teacher Academy project for Erasmus+. We describe the start of the project, our development of the quality monitoring system fitting the circumstances and educational and collaborative principles, and our continuous safeguarding of quality. We reflect on the process and the outcomes (e.g. the quality reports).

To contextualize our approach, we want to bring your attention to the fact that when an Erasmus+ partnership is forged between various educational institutions in different countries, the proposal that is to bind their efforts has a central issue that serves to focus the proposal as well as the partnership. It is true that it serves, as quoted in the call for proposals for this conference, as a ‘glue’ for the various partners. However, such a partnership between educational institutions, always has another issue to deal with, regardless of the ideas in the proposal, and that is the inevitable difference between their educational practices, and possibly philosophies, and how these shape their goals and expectations for collaboration and co-creation. This is relevant insofar as the educational principles any institution practices in educating its students match the ones they use in their own learning and development, and when cooperating with other learners for said development. In short, if the various partners practice what they preach, and they preach different things, the cooperation inevitably faces an extra challenge, and a profound one to boot. Our team set out to turn this into an opportunity. We as educators in a teacher training program that is explicitly veered towards establishing lifelong learning skills in our teacher-trainees, advocate a strong alignment between our own educational practices and our approach to collaborative efforts to learn and build together within an Erasmus+ partnership, in line with the latter framework’s aims for the collaborations it wishes to foster (cf. key action 2 and 3 of the Erasmus+ program.

Faced with the fascinating opportunities this type of partnership entailed, we took some time to look more closely at the situation and performed desk research to acquaint ourselves with the general approach to Quality Assurance. We then decided to introduce an alternative approach based on our own educational philosophies and practices to help sustain motivation and keep management from overextending. We developed our method and introduced it at the first physical meeting, where we walked our partners through the designed method, asked for their consent, and then started up the process the same day to ensure ad hoc support.

The Erasmus+ project pursues direct impact on more than 1000 people and is divided over 5 work packages executed by 8 partners, so a firm and cyclically continuous plan that operated at all levels was needed. We also quickly understood that no quality assurance team can ever reasonably be expected to provide real expertise and concomitant assessment for the contents of all other work packages. We aimed for our approach to practice what we preach in our teacher training programs. The method is based on what we consider strong practices in evaluation and life-long learning, but we geared this towards peers rather than students. Central to this was our general aim to stimulate authentic critical reflection as opposed to one party policing others, on the road to ensuring sustainable (self-)evaluation throughout any development project, as well as to generate a healthy degree of self-regulation (a main ingredient of life-long learning) in all partners including ourselves, to help maximize chances of success in subsequent undertakings of this nature. We checked these principles of our own education against the general principles of the Erasmus+ program and found a strong correlation, summarised, for example, in the following: “(...) the general objective of the Erasmus+ Program (...) is to support, through lifelong learning, the educational, professional and personal development of people in education, training, (…) contributing to sustainable growth, quality jobs and social cohesion, to driving innovation, (…)”. Considering the above, we designed our quality assurance plan around control measures (continuous monitoring of the processes, peer reviews, and external assessment) which we partially transferred onto a Quality Evaluation Unit lead by the QA team. The members of this team are tasked with performing critical reflection with the Task Leaders. Therefore, we designed the ‘Task QA Form’ used at the start of a Task and the ‘Task QA Report’, used to track progress. Both queries invite partners to take stock of their aims and to evaluate their success by breaking down their work and select critical fitting partners. Through the principles of constructive alignment, a careful completion of the form provides the partners valuable insights. The Q&E Unit members pass issues on to the appropriate parties within their respective project teams. When issues are flagged, the Q&E Unit shares its findings with the project management who processes this according to the guidelines. Lastly, the quarterly Quality Monitoring Reports are shared for feedback with all partners.

Our main findings are that the quality assurance plan for the project is well-structured and comprehensive and all partners have repeatedly agreed on the use of it, covering all the aspects, layers, and stages of the project. We also experienced that the quality assurance plan is flexible and adaptive, allowing for adjustments and improvements based on the feedback and results of the monitoring and evaluation activities. This quality assurance plan has also proven to also strengthen collaboration and participation, involving all the partner institutions and stakeholders in the project. Our approach has also shown challenges and limitations which can shed light on challenges that are typical for the kind of Erasmus+ co-operative partnerships. By introducing and discussing our innovative approach to quality assurance work for this Erasmus+ partnership, we wish to stimulate a critical look at the mentioned challenges and opportunities within strategic cooperations in Erasmus+ partnerships. We will invite you to come along with us as we share with you the methods and materials we devised in constructive alignment to our procedural goals, to stimulate insight into the project-as-a-whole, the assigned task work as well as the part it was designed to play in the whole and support self-regulation to strengthen the cooperation between different approaches. All this while not losing sight of the central goals of the project itself, i.e. the deliverables.

Percipio Global Ltd. (z.d.). Metacognition and Self-regulation: Technical appendix | EEF. EEF. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/metacognition-and-self-regulation/technical-appendix