The 10 Good Habits for education innovation

Halmstad is a fast-growing town on Sweden’s west coast: a port, but also a university, industrial and recreational city. The local education system rarely cooperated actively with local companies, organisations, or even parents. Rather, it was strongly managed by municipal departments guided by national rules. Typically for Sweden, local families were involved in children’s sports clubs, but much less so in schools. The opportunity offered by ONBOARD network was to adopt the Education Innovation Network (EIN) approach to modernise education curricula through digital technologies at different ages and stages of learning, to provide pupils with the necessary skills to enter the job market.   The city of Halmstad, which has already been working together with Viladecans since 2014 on a project called IMAILE, in 2018 engaged in transferring the Spanish city’s good practice involving multidisciplinary and multi-sector stakeholders for  the EIN  creation. The EIN is a cooperative structure that brings together public administration, education centers, professionals, families, and enterprises.   With the EIN, Halmstad hoped to deliver short-term improvements such as calmer classrooms, but also longer-term benefits in terms of preparing future professionals and citizens.   The success of the extensive cooperation among partners led to modifying the educational curricula and creating a new teaching approach by adding technologies and involving the parents.   Among the activities developed we can find: “Happy Braincells”: the objective of the project was to give fifth graders an educational package consisting in games, readings and group presentation to give them more knowledge about health factors and the 10 Good Habits. “Stroller Walks”: based on the “Movement” good habit, the students were given a topic which they discussed during walks. When they came back, teachers collected their thoughts in the classrooms. The project entailed the participation of parents. “Increased Learning”: collaboration between training schools, teacher training students, Halmstad University, and the school librarian to increased learning and promoting good reading habits;  Young people influence in local society: collaboration between the municipality and the Oskarström neighbourhood community to get students to be more active and politically mobilized.   The project was also  to implement good practices in everyday’s lessons, e.g. beginning classes by looking back at the previous class (repetition), or mindfully understanding the positive thoughts that reaching a goal brings.