Description
Many creative solutions are available nowadays to help teachers motivate their students, but sometimes it’s hard to incorporate them into lessons.
This course tackles the notion of innovation which is equally important for teachers and students.
On the one hand, educators can use a selection of new methods, activities, and tools that can enhance their teaching, making topics more real and relevant. On the other hand, learners need to become more active, creative, and innovative, in order to link subjects to real-life situations, gather information through critical thinking, and solve modern-day problems.
During this course, participants will explore new design strategies and lesson plans to enhance their teaching and encourage their students to be more innovative and motivated.
The course will offer a series of practical, hands-on activities and group discussions to incorporate into teaching design-related skills, creative activities, contextual learning, role-playing, digital solutions, and thought-provoking exercises. Participants will learn how to adapt them to their specific learning goals so that they can actually use them in their classrooms.
By the end of the course, participants will have gained useful insight into different ways of expanding and updating their teaching toolbox. They will take away a variety of new lesson plans and activities that they can use in their classrooms, to make them more active, creative, and innovative.
Learning outcomes
The course will help the participants to:
- Update their teaching skills;
- Reflect on experiences of creativity and innovation in education;
- Identify some potential disruptive innovations in education and take advantage of “open” innovation;
- Appreciate how the perspective taken on creativity and design affects the policy used to generate it;
- Differentiate between radical and incremental innovation in education;
- Explore student-centered approaches, and innovative solutions including contextual learning, storytelling, role-playing, and technology;
- Design teaching solutions that are suitable to their learning goals;
- Design teaching solutions that keep pace with today’s students and their educational needs;
- Develop a wide range of new ideas, strategies, methods, and lesson plans and feel ready to propose them to students;
- Understand the roles of skill, experience, motivation, and culture in creative endeavors.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Course Introduction and student-centered Approaches
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities;
- Presentations of the participants’ schools;
- Student-centered approach and project-based learning;
- Learning principles about informal education;
- How to improve teaching. Teacher as a trainer.
Day 2 – Technologies and Contextual Learning
- How to use technology-based education;
- Individual and group practical activities;
- Case studies;
- Exploring the power of multimedia and digital apps;
- Contextual Learning.
Day 3 – Creativity in Education
- Practical exercises, cross-media tools;
- Digital storytelling, creativity, and design.
Day 4 – Practical activities: Larp and PBL
- Student-driven activities in LARP (Learning Active Role Playing);
- Designing an effective PBL activity;
- Individual and group practical activities.
Day 5 – Take away your project!
- In Barcelona: Study visit to DES-HUB Museum of Art, Design, and Technology;
- Work session: Preparing a project.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.