Outcomes of the project

Positive impact on the awareness of teachers from partner schools regarding the importance of students’ happiness. It has been proven that teachers at schools do not pay enough attention to the soft skills of the students due to different reasons, but the development of the social and emotional skills of the students brings tangible improvement of the academic results and overall well-being. Last recommendations of the European commission is wider attention on the topic from the school systems and improvements on the development of the social and emotional skills of the students as measures.

Improvement of students’ social and emotional skills as mindfulness, self-awareness and awareness about others, empathy towards others (including those who may have different backgrounds), and trustworthiness.

Students focusing on the positive aspects of life and their ability to control how they experience it.

Tangible results of the project and their impact:

1. Result 1 – Collection of good practices of happiness programs in schools Manual of good practice – Each partner in their country will select 2 schools (Except schools-Otetz Paisii and Aleksa Šantić) based on the criteria defined at the beginning of the project (total 12 schools). Before that, the partners will develop a Methodology for collecting good practices and adequate questionnaires. Every partner will collect at least 10 examples of good practices.The final analysis will be developed in the form of a consolidated report, describing best practices in every country as well as in the EU. Meetings with teachers will be held in every partner country, showing the benefits and ways of implementation of practices. Aleksa Šantić will prepare a report on findings. After that one of the partners will do the gap analysis and do the report on findings. In the end the result will be a creation of a consolidated guide – Happy – Back to school foundation of happiness which will incorporate all findings into one, complete manual, representing the state of the art practices in Europe.
2. Result 2 – Create a Happiness Curriculum – An educational content based on analysis of gathered good practices, which will include educational material for primary school students (age 6-10) that will primarily refer to social and emotional skills aimed at strengthening the foundations of happiness and motivation for students.
3. Result 3 – Training program for teachers based on the methodology “Train a trainer – it is crucial to acquire competencies that are needed to present educational content from the happiness curriculum. The training program will focus on presenting strategies, web tools, methods that teachers will use, also in developing skills for online teaching,in using the best practices gathered at international level,in developing competences to conduct quality online activities for all the students,to motivate students for online learning, to involve parents in supporting their children during online school.
4. Result 4 – A guidebook for parents – A guide for parents will be made  after the development of the curriculum for happiness.The Guidebook with the  development of exercises for home usage will increase the parents’s awareness of the importance of training social and emotional skills and the good results from it for their children in life long term.
5. Result 5 – Avatars – A virtual character, a manual  “How to motivate students through virtual character in the classroom”

An application with online virtual character-culturally adjustable, who would arouse curiosity at the beginning of each activity, show interesting short contents that will stimulate students in an innovative and attractive way and arouse a sense of happiness and belonging to their class.

Our project has a unique solution to the current problem caused by the pandemic situation and lockdown. Europe needs ideas and methods to overcome the current mental state of students especially when returning to school, such as positive psychology, thinking about growth, development of passion and perseverance, social metacognition – a combination of social psychology and metacognition. What is new in this idea is that it involves students, teachers and parents in a common approach.