[Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash]

Novigado invited different stakeholders to respond to the two questions: How should active learning look like in a school? What would you recommend to teachers? Fernando Franco, former teacher and school leader, and currently a member of the Directorate-General for Education in Portugal, shares his perspective based on the Portuguese experience.

 Innovative Educational Environments (IIE) / Learning Environments (LE) are workspaces thought and designed for the development of active learning, centred on students and where technology can play a decisive role in the enrichment of these same spaces. They were born in 2014 based on the Future Classroom Lab (FCL) concept created by European Schoolnet, and aimed, at the time, to promote technological and pedagogical modernization traditional classrooms, where teaching styles, generally focused on the transmission of knowledge, prevailed.

With the passage of years, the number of schools that intended to create innovative spaces has significantly increased. It has been the mission of the Educational Technologies and Resources Team of the Directorate-General for Education to provide guidelines for the dynamization of these spaces, fundamentally at the level of teacher training in methodologies and pedagogical practices appropriate to the goal of educating in a society of information and knowledge where digital prevails. For that reason, the team has been supported by the network of ICT Competence Centres and by the Learning Lab Ambassadors, which promote training and practical work sessions focused on methodologies suitable for collaborative, project work and problem solving.

What is more, a study carried out by the Lisbon Institute of Education, which surveyed a group of directors and teachers responsible for creating IIE / LE spaces in their schools, made it possible to understand the reasons underlying the creation of these spaces.

Are you interested to know more about these research results and more key points about active learning? Read the full article by Fernando Franco here to know more on how innovative learning spaces are connected to active learning.