A proud Hannes next to our pin board

Hannes and I presented our project at the Comenius Regio conference which was hosted by the PAD in Münster on Dec 12 and 13. Münster is located north of the industrial Ruhr area. I went by train – a trip of well over 600 km.

The Pädagogischer Austauschdienst (PAD) is the sole public organisation in Germany working on behalf of the Federal States to promote international exchange and cooperation in the school sector. The PAD is a department of the Secretariat of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany (Kultusministerkonferenz).

Hannes and I had the opportunity to exchange experiences with other project coordinators. Everybody had to set up a pin board summing up their projects. Some of us even gave a mini presentation (20 min + 10 min Q & A). We did! As we had to compete with three parallel presentations in our time slot, we were quite happy to find that in our room almost every chair was taken. The audience was quite interested in what we had to say about our project. I was asked a lot of questions. A representative of the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts, reassured me that we are right on track with our project. He told me that they had invited Prof. John Hattie to a conference at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt on Nov 11 which was attended by over 500 experts from the education sector.