Pixel International Conferences

This paper describes “Avanguardie Educative” [1] as a movement of innovative schools that is being researched by INDIRE with the aim of studying how teaching and organizational changes may be implemented within a school and mainstreamed to other schools.

The main ideas of the “movement” are described in its “manifesto” that has been written by INDIRE with the contribute of the 22 school headteachers who are the co-promoters of the movement.

The Manifesto is built around seven pillars that, together, provide the vision for a new school model that is more aligned with the challenges of an always-mutable and demanding knowledge society: transforming the transmission model of education (where the teacher is speaking and the students are listening); exploiting the ICT potential to promote new ways of teaching, learning and assessment; rethinking the learning environment; rearranging the school time; aligning the school culture to the knowledge society’s challenges; investing on networking and fostering relationships (i.e. school-community and school-work relationships); making innovation transferrable and sustainable.

Based on this vision, the Manifesto showcases some innovative practices dealing with a new concept of space, time and teaching/learning processes. Among these we can highlight some trends. The traditional lesson scheme was abandoned [2] and the students became protagonist of their own learning process, fostering their creativity and critical thinking [3]. Furthermore, these practices engendered a revision of the learning environment [4], together with its furniture and internal setting, since more flexible and interactive activities occur. Another trend observed was a change of the schedule of the lesson, together with the need of a more efficient collaboration among the school itself and the socio-cultural context [5].

At present, the “Avanguardie Educative” movement involves 22 advanced schools and 80 advanced practitioners and it is open to new subscriptions from those schools that want both to test/adapt one or more innovation practices and to propose new ones.

The schools that will choose to adopt one or more innovative practices will be involved in a blended learning course [6] and will be provided with coaching assistance by the 22 advanced schools and by INDIRE.