The European Commission has announced the winning schools of the new European Award for Innovative Teaching EITA – European Innovative Teaching Award.

The award went to the schools of the countries participating in the Erasmus+ Programme which, between 2014 and 2020, made their projects the key to innovating teaching and learning, face to face and with digital media. The launch of the new initiative and a first presentation of the winning institutions took place yesterday, in an online event attended by Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, and Simona Kustec, Minister of Education, Science and Sport, of Slovenia.

The award celebrates the achievements of teachers and schools using innovative teaching and learning practices in European partnerships. It aims to give greater visibility to their work and to promote mutual learning between teachers and school staff. Furthermore, the award highlights the value of the Erasmus+ Programme for teacher collaboration in Europe.

Each country participating in the Programme has selected four Erasmus+ projects. In Italy, the Indire Erasmus+ National Agency has identified the best activities carried out by schools under Key Action 1 for mobility and Key Action 2 for cooperation in projects. The selected schools represent all school levels: early childhood education and care; primary education; upper and lower secondary education with general courses; upper secondary education with professional paths (technical/vocational institutes). In the project selection phase, the Agency took into account a series of quality indicators relating to methodologies, learning environments (including digital learning), and the impact on learning and teaching processes in schools.

The winning Italian schools of EITA 2021

The EITA 2021 award for the technical professional level goes to the G. Galilei School of Treviso and to the teacher, Iola Da Monte, contact person for the Erasmus+ Young European generation project towards a connected world with the use of domotics in housing renovation. The Institute has carried out, in partnership with a French school, a project on the use of new technologies to support a wide range of disabilities, to address inclusion in different contexts.

The project Nature, Innovation and ICT of the unified school of Bobbio Capoluogo (Piacenza) was selected for the school level early childhood education and care and primary education. The teacher coordinator Vittoria Volterrani, with colleagues and pupils of the school, worked on the theme of the environment, using digital learning and new technologies. The Piacenza school has implemented the Erasmus+ project with partner institutions from Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Iceland and the Czech Republic.

The state institute of upper secondary education, Federico Enriques, of Castelfiorentino (Florence) was awarded for the project E-Learning from Nature, relating to general secondary education. The coordinator, teacher Andrea Conforti, worked in partnership with schools in Ireland, Belgium, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal and Romania to promote knowledge of scientific subjects, with a multidisciplinary didactic approach, which led students to build their own personal scientific learning process from real world observation.

The project Better teachers for better students’ language skills of the unified school G. Barone, of Baranello, Campobasso, was selected as part of the Erasmus+ mobility projects for teacher training. A group of teachers from the school and the referent teacher, Carmela Pietrangelo, attended courses on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodologies in the United Kingdom to introduce new teaching strategies to be used in kindergarten and primary school.

A European Awards Ceremony is scheduled for 20 October, which will be held in the form of an online event open to all.

Official hashtag: # EITA2021

For info and insights:

• European Award for Innovative Teaching EITA 2021
• The video of the launch event of the EITA 2021 Award
• The video with the presentation of the winning European schools of the EITA 2021 Award