Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Erasmus + Project „THINK FAST, THINK
DECIDE WELL, BE STRONG!” concluded!

“THINK FAST, THINK SLOW, DECIDE WELL, BE STRONG!”  that finished the 1st of November. We received 24 Baltic participants from Latvia and Lithuania. Here you have a summary of what we did. 

During the preparation, each participant organization made its own activities in its country to prepare participants to the exchange and to spoke about the ideas for the activities to do. Baltics watched a movie about Spain culture. We were also going through the application of the project to understand better what we are going to do before and during the exchange. We had also an explanation about what is Youth pass and the different parts of the certificate.

We reflected about what does the name of the Project „Think fast, Think slow, decide well, be strong”. For example in Latvia everybody wrote down what first came up to their mind when hearing a sentence as Think fast, think slow and so on. People had various thoughts about it!

On September 25th our 24 Baltic guests arrived. The first decision making workshop in Madrid was about different competences of decision-making. There were discussed competences, including communication in foreign languages, digital competence, learning to learn and cultural awareness and expression

On Friday, September 26, participants had a very thought provoking meeting with one of Spain's most prominent lawyers – Efrén Díaz. In this hour long talk Efren highlighted the many difficult decisions he has had to make in his career as well as gave the participants tips on how to tackle any difficult decision His talk was centred on 3 stories from his personal experience. After the meeting with the advocate, we had the activity “Responsible decision-making” a video debate based on the movie "Vertical limit". Kristaps had prepared it very well, and the result was quite interesting. Kristaps was animating the debate, which was quite hot: At the end of this activity we understood better the importance of having strong set of values and criteria (“thinking slow”) that allow taking difficult decisions rapidly when necessary.

During the following days we had many other activities. For example, to learn how to make good decisions under time pressure, we took part in an activity called "Paper house building". During the development of a project, there are many situations in which the team should make a decision. Usually, there is not much time, and decisions should be taken quickly. This activity consists in building a little house with just a few tools: some sheets of paper, a pair of scissors, some adhesive, and a pencil. By this activity, we learnt about the importance of listening to all the members of the group, in order to optimize the potential and the talent of each one.

We did also sports and an excursion in the mountains prepared by ourselves. Especially for Baltic participants this was a very interesting moment, because in their homeland there are not such big mountains as in Spain. We had to take care of the logistic of the excursion, and everything went very well.

By the end of the exchange we made a presentation of the project at school El Prado, in Madrid. During the meeting with our mates from the school we told about our trip from its beginning, and also about the possibilities offered by the program Erasmus +.

Back home we prepare the material for the dissemination of the results of the project: a video that Latvians prepared in collaboration with a professional of the field, and a blog that Lithuanians prepared in collaboration with Latvian and Spanish participants. 

Here you can consult the main results of the project: the blog and the video created by the participants about the project and the exchange.

Blog: http://www.decisionmaking2014.blogspot.com

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgFAYsSoS3U



It was really a good experience; we hope we could do it again!!

The project „Think fast, think slow, decide well, be strong!”, Nr. 2014-2-LV02-
KA105-000281, was sponsored by the European Union