Celebrate World Teachers' Day by planning a teacher professional development course

The Open Discovery Space Academy, exploiting and expanding the outputs, experiences and heritage of the Open Discovery Space (ODS) project, offers a multitude of courses to school leaders, teachers acting as change agents in their schools and teachers with a newly acquired taste for innovative practices from all over Europe.

The aim of the Academy is to support school innovation and to train school leaders and school staff to promote the development of their schools into open learning communities, and thus improve the quality of all aspects of schooling. The ODS academy offers different summers courses on how to promote innovation in the school.

Innovation in action

The Open Discovery Space development and innovation course is addressed to school leaders and leading members of school staff, who can act as change and innovation agents. The aim of the course is to support school innovation and to train teachers to act as successful change agents in their schools and to promote the development of schools into open learning communities. The participants will be invited to monitor their schools’ profiles and assess their needs, as well as to acknowledge their own professional competences, so as to then set specific development goals.

Designing inclusive learning activities

This summer school will offer a range of pedagogical strategies, curricular content, and scenario-based learning, addressing key ethical and political concepts, emerging in the classroom or generated by students and/or teachers. and supporting dialogue and experiential learning in relation to Education about Religions and Beliefs and Ethics through pedagogical strategies and content. The summer school will focus on issues such as: a) techniques for teachers to facilitate difficult ethical discussions, b) building social skills through innovative learning activities to facilitate inclusion and democracy in the classroom c) social inclusion, learning design and games.

Opening up the school to the society

This summer school will present an educational community building framework bringing together individual schools, school associations, parents associations, science centres and museums, industries, research institutes, universities and European organisations in an innovative collaboration. It will focus on the process for envisioning, managing, monitoring and assessing change in school settings that’s appropriate for a school’s local needs. This process will make it clear that schools have much to gain by fostering connections between formal and informal learning, between existing providers of education and new entrants and stakeholders.

Games in 21st century teaching and learning

This course focuses on how school communities can make use of games and gameful design to promote innovation and the development of an open and inclusive education culture, preparing students for the challenges and opportunities of life in the 21st century. Participants will work with state-of-the-art pedagogical concepts and game design methods to create learning activities addressing the needs of their own professional context. Practical case studies will explicate the possibilities offered by games and gameful pedagogy for the development of creative thinking, prosociality, conflict resolution and debating skills, in learning scenarios that get students to address controversial topical issues and dilemmas.

Learn more on our upcoming courses