The experience of the Trident Project revealed that the three partner countries (Romania, Germany and Hungary) are in different stages of progress in terms of the activity and training of students’ internship tutors. The need to develop O5 - Internship Guide for Tutors (TSP) - arose from the fact that, at the partners level, there is no unitary practice regarding the teaching tools used by tutors / mentors during the internship; although at the level of HdP and MRVT there is a training course for TSP, none of the partner institutions has a Guide for them.
The purpose of the Guide is to support, through the training of tutors, the success of the internship, and the main objective of the work is to present the professional processes and principles related to the tasks of the TSP, as well as to provide methodological recommendations and to create and make available to those interested a series of teaching materials adapted to the internship. Initially (and much of the drafting period), the Guide was conceived as a unique work, common to the three partners. SAPSM, HdP and MRVT experts tried to identify the communication and pedagogy elements common to all and focus on their presentation in correlation. As the discussions and debates have progressed, it has been found that each institution has other issues that it considers it needs to focus on and that it considers to be the most important to pass on to its own TSPs.
Finally, in order to achieve the finality pursued by the Project, the information was reorganized, the Internship Guide for TSP containing the common aspects, applicable to all partners, grouped by chapters (tasks and requirements for tutors and coordinators of teaching methods recommended for TSP, online educational platforms, jointly created teaching films, collection of good practices of partners). The specific Guides, adapted to institutional needs, were set up in three distinct Annexes: Annex 1 - Aspects specific to SAPSM for the tutors of the internship (in Romanian), Annex 2 - Internship Guide for practice coordinators and tutors at HdP level (in German) and Annex 3 - Specific aspects of MRVT (in Hungarian).
SAPSM has proposed through this Guide to make available to TSP a series of teaching methods and tools adapted to its own objectives of the internship, while the German partner, HdP, considers it is important to clarify the role of leader and that of tutor. And here there was a difference in approach between MRVT and HdP: MRVT clarified the direct guiding role of tutors and the role of teaching of the tutor, and HdP focused mainly on the role of coordinators/supervisors of the internship.
The guide complements the teaching tools made available to tutors through Trident Educational Platform. These two elements (the Guide and the Platform) will be genuine 'fulcrums' in guiding and training the TSP, without requiring further training and removing them from workplace. O5 presents an innovative approach also by using means and tools in the IT field, having direct practical applicability in the activities carried out by them and for training (e.g. VR technique).
The Guide did not intend to make a complete, exhaustive presentation of all the methods and tools for transmitting knowledge that the TSP should use in the training activity of the student during the internship, but, in the light of the experience of the experts who participated in its elaboration, to make a selection of the most appropriate methods and tools that TSP have at hand. An interesting aspect emerged from the transnational collaboration: the fact that there are a number of didactic methods used and recommended by TSP by all partners, but under different names, which were included in the chapter Teaching methods recommended for TSP.
In the spirit of forward-looking, these tools can be used as models of good practice by other police education institutions within the partner states, also by any educational institution specialising in public order and police training institutions in Europe. This output has been developed in the three languages of the project partners, as well as in English. Its elaboration was attended by experts from the partner institutions (management staff, teaching staff, technicians).
NOTE: Annexes 1 to 3 are drawn up only in the language of the institution to which it is addressed and are made available to those concerned in accordance with specific internal procedures.