Learning community

The project

It is a project based on a set of Successful Educational Actions, aimed at the social and educational transformation of the community. It is a project that begins at school, but that integrates everything around it. We want to achieve a successful education for all children and young people that achieve, at the same time, efficiency, equity and social cohesion.
Combining science and utopia, the project seeks a significant improvement in the school learning of all students, at all levels and, also, the development of a better coexistence and solidarity attitudes.
A better world, built by all, and for all!

Scientific basis

The structure and concept of the Learning Communities have a very solid scientific base, developed over more than 30 years of research and today involves a team of more than 70 specialists from different countries and various fields of education. knowledge.
Its conceptual basis is endorsed by the conclusions of the INCLUD-ED Project, developed by the European Commission precisely to identify and analyze educational strategies that help overcome inequalities and improve learning outcomes.
This analysis led to the identification of a series of Successful Educational Actions: those practices that have proven the best results in education, and that have the backing of the international scientific community. The differential feature of these Successful Educational Actions is the fact that they are universal: they have demonstrated the best results in the most different contexts.

Results

The essence of the project is to guarantee everyone’s right to learn and learn a lot. Equal opportunities nowadays mean equal results. The Learning Communities create a climate of high expectations on the part of everyone involved, transform the learning context and obtain the following results:
Improvement of the academic performance of all students. Improvement of students’ school results in all subjects. A high level of learning is essential to face the constant challenges of 21st century society.
Radical decrease in repetition rates, dropout and school failure.
Improvement of climate and coexistence; increased solidarity attitudes.
Increased sense and quality of learning for the whole community.
Increase in the participation of all: students, family members, teachers, management teams, universities, foundations, entities and public organizations.
Improvement of the living conditions of the community: higher rates of employment, health levels, decent housing.
To become a Learning Community, the school has to undergo a transformation process and apply the Successful Educational Actions, which are anchored in the principles of Dialogic Learning.

Educational Performances of Success

The European research project INCLUD-ED identified and analyzed a series of Successful Educational Actions – practices that have proven to increase academic performance and improve coexistence and solidarity attitudes in all schools observed.
INCLUD-ED is the only economic, social and human sciences project selected by the European Commission among the ten studies, of all scientific areas, which had the greatest impact in recent years. This research identified a very important factor on Successful Educational Actions: these work in any educational and social context, they are therefore universal.
In Europe, the results of this study, carried out in 14 countries, have already been included in the guidelines and recommendations of the European Parliament to overcome school failure and inequality in education.
Next, the Successful Educational Actions that must be part of the Learning Communities.

Interactive Groups
Interactive groups is the form of classroom organization that has so far managed to generate the best results. It consists of grouping all the students in a classroom into subgroups of four or five young people, in the most heterogeneous way possible with regard to gender, language, motivations, level of learning and cultural origin.
Each of the groups incorporates an adult from the school or community and its environment, which voluntarily enters the classroom to encourage interactions.
The teacher prepares as many activities as there are groups (usually 4). The groups change activity every 15 or 20 minutes. The students solve the activities interacting with each other through an equal dialogue. It is the responsibility of adults to ensure that all members of the group participate and contribute in solidarity with the resolution of the task. The formation of interactive groups makes the interactions diversify and multiply and that all working time is effective.
It is, therefore, a form of inclusive grouping that improves academic outcomes, interpersonal relationships and coexistence.

Dialogical gatherings
It is about the collective construction of meaning and knowledge through dialogue about the best creations of humanity in disciplines such as literature, art or music. With the Dialogical Tertulias, the direct approximation of the students – without distinction of age, gender, culture or capacity – is intended to universal classical culture and to the scientific knowledge accumulated by mankind over time.
The Tertulia is developed by sharing – through a rigorous respect of the turn of speech – those ideas or sections of the work that the participants have previously selected because they have caught their attention or caused some reflection. This generates a very enriching exchange, which allows greater depth in the topics and promotes the construction of new knowledge. In the sessions, one of the participants assumes the role of moderator, with the idea of ​​favoring the equal participation of all.
The most experienced so far are the Literary Dialogical Tertulias, in which people meet to talk and share about a book of universal classical literature. The option for the classics is due to the fact that these works address the most central issues in people’s lives and have therefore remained in time; and because this breaks the elitist cultural barriers that have considered classical literature a heritage of certain social groups. Thus, access to culture is democratized for all people.
Literary Dialogical Tertulias have shown that they increase vocabulary, improve oral expression and reading comprehension. At the same time, it is an exercise of respect, of equal listening, that transforms the context of people and creates meaning.

Family Formation
The training offer of schools is open not only to students and teachers but also to families. The formation of relatives is oriented on the one hand towards knowledge and participation in Successful Educational Actions and, on the other, to respond to the interests and training needs of the families themselves.
The school offers, in this way, training spaces and programs, although it is the families themselves who decide (usually through a mixed commission) what, how and when they want to learn.
Why is the formation of family members important? To respond to their immediate needs and thus promote an improvement of their living conditions. And also because the INCLUD-ED project concluded, among other things, that the academic outcome of children and adolescents does not depend so much on the educational level previously achieved by families but on the fact that parents are also in a training process while their children are in the school. This increases the sense, expectations and commitment to the importance of education.

Pedagogical dialogic training
In order to develop Successful Educational Actions in schools, an essential aspect is the formation in their scientific, theoretical bases and in the evidences endorsed by the international scientific community.
It is urgent in education to move from occurrences to evidence. For that, it is necessary to go directly to the most relevant theoretical sources in the world and to the results of the highest level studies on education. Especially teachers have to be prepared to know how to argue about their practice and distinguish between opinions and scientific knowledge. This is the way to incorporate the Successful Educational Actions into the classroom. Thus, they will also begin to evaluate their training based on the results obtained by their students.
In this sense, one of the most successful performances educates