Methodological and organisational innovation processes – Avanguardie educative
Project Code: 10.2.7.A1 – ESFNOP- INDIRE-2017-1
PUI: B55G17000000006
Axis I “Investing in competences, education and lifelong learning”
SO 10.2 – “Enhancement of key competences of students also through the support of the development of the skills of teachers, trainers and staff”
Action 10.2.7 – System actions for the definition of models, contents and innovative methods (adaptable to the local context)
Duration of the project: from 01/01/2016 to 31/12/2018
Extension of activities until 31/12/2019
Referent for the project and the line of research – Elisabetta Mughini
Since 2016, the project “Methodological and organisational innovation processes – Avanguardie educative” is funded by the European structural funds as part of the multi-fund National Operational Programme (2014IT05M2OP001) “For schools – competences and learning environments” 2014 – 2020, financed under Axis I – “investing in competences, education and lifelong learning”.
In line with SO 10.2 – “Enhancement of key competences of students also through the support of the development of the skills of teachers, trainers and staff” and Action 10.2.7 – System actions for the definition of models, contents and innovative methods (adaptable to the local context), the project aims to identify “ideas for innovation” that would revolutionise space and time of learning and teaching. Transforming the lecture-based school model and promoting innovation in order to make it sustainable and transferable are two of the 7 horizons of the Avanguardie educative movement. The movement was born in 2014 under the joint initiative of Indire and a group of funding schools that experimented innovative didactic solutions. Its aims are gathered and explained in the Avanguardie educative’s Manifesto which is organised into 7 “horizons”.
The movement builds on the assumption that often new and potentially innovative didactic practices are born out of the talent of one person or are the result of a context that created a special chemistry. In both cases, the change produced risks remaining confined to the context where it occurred with no external impact.
Within this perspective, the project aims to create the preconditions to implement transferable and sustainable innovation through tools designed together with the schools already engaged in significant experimentations at national level.
The movement sustains didactic and organisational innovation through the innovation ideas: each idea contributes to rethinking the lecture-based school model to give a concrete answer to the constantly changing challenges of the knowledge society.
The three interrelated basic dimensions of teaching: Physical Space, Time and Didactics provide the core grounds of the innovation processes triggered off by the Ideas. Didactics is the driver of change, impacting time and physical spaces. On one hand, it is the starting point to trigger off change to overcome the rigidity of the school calendar, lesson timing and subjects distribution (temporal dimension); on the other, it affects the structural limits of the class, such as the disposition of desks and fixed furniture, conflicting with the dynamicity of communicative processes enabled by ICT (physical space dimension).
Each idea doesn’t have by itself the strength to overcome inertia mechanisms affecting and paralysing schools. Research and experience confirm that innovation doesn’t work with just a top down approach, to the contrary, it eradicates without rejection if contagion dynamics are triggered off. The strategy supporting the Avanguardie educative movement is this of building up a system through a network of schools that have already made the firs steps in the tortuous path towards innovation.
The project allows schools that decide to adhere to the movement (the so-called adhering schools) to access an online environment of assistance-coaching to experiment innovation ideas thanks to the support od the leading schools. Teaches and head teachers have the opportunity to confront themselves with other teachers who have already experimented the innovation paths proposed. In the online environment, documents and multimedia materials are also available; and moments of reflection and experience sharing (thematic and transversal webinars) are organised. These – together with in person seminars – aim to create the bases for a teachers’ community of practice.
The research project aims also to identify new experiences of bottom up innovation through an online forum, that allows Italian schools to submit their continuous and systematic innovation experiences to the attention of Avanguardie educative. These experiences are analysed by an especially set up editorial board to evaluate their coherence with the principles of the manifesto and their actual transformation into Movement’s ideas.
The identification of new ideas is accompanied by the production of guidelines for their implementation and the identification of new leading schools that make their experience available to other Italian schools, providing new ways to implement innovation processes with the support of the schools that have already experimented them.
The good educational practices, identified and evaluated through the research-action process carried out between schools and Indire researchers – produce not only online documentation (the YouTube channel “Make innovation visible”) but also actual tools for self-training for teachers and headmasters relating to the educational practices proposed.
Since 2016, the project “Methodological and organisational innovation processes – Avanguardie educative” is funded by the European structural funds as part of the multi-fund National Operational Programme “For schools – competences and learning environments”.
The actions funded are:
- organization of events for dissemination and enhancement at international and national level;
- management, updating and implementation of online information, training and dissemination channels;
- training and coaching support and assistance, through the preparation of self-training materials for the online community;
- study and analysis of processes activated through quantitative and qualitative tools.