Our school, Droste-Hülshoff-Gymnasium, is located in the southwest of Berlin. More than 80 teachers educate about 850 students from grade seven to twelve. Two of our five classes per year have a special profile: one is focused on music with a lot of voluntary activities and the other on French as first foreign language. Nearly 100% of our students are learning English all the time.
The main school building is over 120 years old but it was permanentely modernized especially for the digitalisation. We offer a multi-ethnic environment, embracing a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds, and pride ourselves on being an institute free from racism after having been awarded an honorary title by the senate of Berlin for our endeavours („Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage“ = school without racism – school with courage).
Many students are very concerned with the issues raised by global warming and take a very active part in confronting this danger. Therefore and for continuing yearly projects our school has been awarded with a special certificate for climate protection, named « Berliner Klimaschule », by the state of Berlin for the last ten years.
Since this school year „sustainability“ is one of the main obiectives, too. We began to implement a different number of the SDGs in the internal curricula; during a project week in December 2023 the new obiective was implemented in the school community.
Other activities and experiences of our school which were relevant for the new project, are
- bilingual teaching (German-English) in grade 9 and 10 (geography, biology, arts)
- special classes in grade 10 and 11 belonging to „sustainability“
- teaching of digital competences in all grades
- participation in a model project „hybrid learning and teaching“
- exchange programs especially with different schools in France
- experiences with different kinds of evaluation
- the voluntary group „Klimaretter“ (climate savers)
- experiences in European projects (Comenius 2011-13 and Erasmus 2016-19)