The Future of Education

This work will focus on the presentation of the innovative pedagogical model at Lisbon Commerce School (ECL - Escola de Comércio de Lisboa), the Project “To Be”, which is now being developed under the scope of the Portuguese Ministry of Education Project AFC - Autonomy and Curricular Flexibility. Having in mind several international essays from all over the world, from the European Commission, to OECD or The World Economic Forum, which state the importance of the 21^st century skills, the project “To Be” addresses the significance of developing students’ competences that will enable them to prosper and shape their world in the future, by defining a model of the person at the end of secondary education in this institution (ECL). Therefore, the work will attempt to enlighten how in this methodology, the student is at the core, through project-based learning with a multidisciplinary approach to engage students in investigation of authentic problems and address local and global challenges by focusing on transversal competences with collaborative classroom practices. The Project is being experienced by two pedagogical teams with 70 and 50 students each. Students work with two or three classes in the same learning environment and with shared teaching (two to three teachers simultaneously). This means having learning spaces with a new layout that allow flexibility and movement of a larger grouping of pupils, where the teacher has a new role and works as a guide and a key element to accompany the student, whereas the latter is the main actor. The project purpose is also to facilitate attention to diversity, not only pedagogical differentiation but a multicultural, and multilingual vision. Moreover, it stresses the collaborative work between teachers – who have a common working space – which means that peers work around cross-curricular modules that are negotiated together with the students. Also, the work will attempt to demonstrate how this Project facilitates learning through normalized incorporation of ICT tools. 

Keywords: Innovative learning; student-centred; project based learning; curricular flexibility;