Can education be adapted to new global realities?

A network of Jesuit teachers in Catalonia, Spain, along with parents and students believe so, and this is why they have started implementing a new innovative educational program called Horizon 2020.
“We want this new school to continuously incorporate new discoveries in pedagogy, psychology and neuroscience, in order to effectively educate for the 21st century and beyond. We want to create well-rounded, competent, conscientious, compassionate and committed individuals.”
They are developing practical, useful, and dynamic tools that seek to include the different dreams, situations and desires of everyone involved in the educational process.
Everything around us is changing and therefore the learning process has to change: from the methods (more participatory), the format and organization of the curriculum or the educational spaces where these groups of teachers have decided to work in classrooms without walls, where the schedule is divided into projects, rather than subjects, and there is ongoing evaluation of the work that is done. Technology has played a major role since most proposals involve the use of computers and other new teaching materials.
[pullquote align=”left or right”]Everything around us is changing and therefore the learning process has to change. [/pullquote] But this is not the only innovative school in the Spanish Jesuit province that has adapted to the new needs of students. Padre Piquer training center in Madrid has been able to respond to the increase of migrant groups in their school (more than 25 nationalities with different religions, languages and cultures) as well as students with special educational needs. They have done so by implementing several responses: “Linking classrooms”, where students who have just arrived from other countries take Spanish language immersion classes, skills development programs, educational compensation plans, multitask cooperative rooms and a family care center.
In the words of the principal, Ángel Serrano: “Piquer is a center of opportunities for everyone”  because “it is a school that tries to answer to the daily social and cultural reality of the world”. For the principal, “The three main elements of this experience are that we have restored the excitement of the students to come to school, we have restored the joy of the parents and families because they watch their kids learning and having fun and we have restored the satisfaction of the teachers”.
In fact, Padre Piquer has recently received an award from Ashoka, the international network on Social Entrepreneurs, as a Changemaker school to highlight the efforts made to imagine and take action on designing new and innovative ways of thinking about education.
Take a look at the Changemaker schools video to learn more.
 
Photo: ​http://www.claver.fje.edu/