Local schools

The Secondary Education Centre Vilafranca 2 is a two-line public centre that is committed to co-teaching and globalised work. Roger Puig-Serra, the pedagogical coordinator of the centre, explains how they promote self-regulated learning with different reflection strategies such as doubt tables during project work, Socratic dialogues to link learning from different areas and previous works at the beginning of all classes and stopover sessions to reflect on the ongoing work concerning the objectives and assessment criteria halfway trough the project. They see a clear increase in pupil satisfaction and learning, perceiving the delivery of drafts and improved works as second and third opportunities. 

The Primary and Secondary Education Centre Les Vinyes is a public centre, born with a clear transformative intention, seeking to create a culture of learning and reflection. In order to continue stimulating and building the learning culture at the centre, 6 years ago, they decided to make study visits to centres in the United States. There, they discovered the learning presentations. As Marta Torelló Navarro tells us, these presentations served not only to find their shared line and establish deeper connections between the proposals and the gaze of the centre, but also became a main tool in promoting self-regulated learning and proves their successes.

The Primary and Secondary Education Centre Les Feixes is a centre of maximum complexity, created in 2023. From the beginning, they introduced an educational project based on team teaching, projects and continuous feedback. They organise their teaching staff in two groups, one for the STEAM subjects and one for the other subjects and work each month on a project, combining competences of the different subjects with transversal competences. Based on the practice of Austin’s butterfly, Sandra Luque talks to us about “making butterflies”, turning feedback and continuous improvement into an integral part of learning. The last week of each project, “the slow week”, is dedicated only to making butterflies and final editing of the products before their final submission.

The Secondary Education Centre Neus Català is a public centre of maximum complexity. It was created in 2015 with an innovation project focused on digitisation, personalisation of learning and interdisciplinarity. Its director highlights the advantages of being a relatively “small” centre, as this allows them proximity and a different way of working. Ivan Marchal, a member of the faculty, shares a school practice with us: the assessment reports. These were developed to create a space for dialogue and reflection between teachers, pupils and families. Not only do they include grades, but they also incorporate personalised comments, competency subnotes and self-assessments written by the pupils themselves.

The Virolai school in Barcelona is a private centre receiving public funding, located in a natural space that, for Sandra Entrena Ortega, the teacher who receives us, symbolises the open mind they seek to stimulate in the pupils. Feedback is part of the work of the centre, seeking in particular a type of feedback that fosters self-regulated learning. She tells us that giving feedback on draft submissions can create a certain dependence on pupils who then expect to receive feedback before doing anything else. That is why they seek to give a different kind of feedback, often in question format, that encourages pupils to look for their own ways to improve their work.

The Garbí Pere Vergés school in Badalona is a private centre receiving public funding, which considers the importance it gives to social life, its differential feature, viewing teachers and pupils as cohabiting in the centre just like citizens in a city. A practice that is already part of the centre’s DNA, as Natalia Pueyo and Montserrat Yuste assure us during our visit, is the didactic contract. It is a document developed by the pupils, where learning objectives are proposed, with the support of the tutor. Signed by teachers, pupils and families and regularly reviewed, it is the main tool to promote self-regulated learning and commitment. In addition, they highlight how they pursue in all classes and with all the tools of self-assessment, co-assessment, etc., they combine, that students fall in love with learning, considering that it is this love that favours their continued learning in future stages and throughout their lives.

The Primary and Secondary Education Centre Josep Maria Xandri focuses on the personalisation of learning in its school project. In order to offer each pupil an individual itinerary, they work with shared or “connected” spaces between primary and secondary school, which allows pupils to complete tasks at a level that is considerably lower or higher than that they are enrolled in. Marta Capdevila and Ester Cubí tell us that they achieve this personalisation, thanks to specific tutoring and a tool that documents all individual planning, its implementation and the reflection on learning. At the centre, they have developed a personal schedule or calendar that is the backbone of all their practices towards self-regulated learning, facilitates the communication between teachers, pupils and families, as well as planning, feedback monitoring, and reflection.

The Primary and Secondary Education Centre Santa Anna is a highly complex centre. Four years ago, they decided to implement a comprehensive educational project from kindergarten to high school. As a centre, they have worked a lot on educational innovation, internationalisation and digitisation. Meritxell Santolaria explains that the centre’s commitment to self-regulated learning is manifested above all in three key aspects: personalised tutoring, their own assessment reports and the role of the inclusion experts that help this approach to work for all pupils and their families.

The Secondary Education Centre Vilamajor shares with us a classroom practice, which Anna Valès Miravalles developed first in the context of her preparation for the national teacher exams and continues to implement and improve year after year. When addressing the issue of globalisation, she began by asking herself what is of interest to the current youth of her classrooms. “Fashion,” she thought. This is how she developed her project around fashion, global production chains, labour rights and sustainability. As pupils investigate the subject in groups and develop posters, she shares examples from other years, asks questions and gives feedback all the time.

The Secondary Education Centre Peralada was created in 2020. As a newly created centre, it encountered a continuous increase in teaching staff that led to a rethinking of the educational project year after year. They saw the need to work on this and found inspiration to reach self-regulated learning through study visits to the OBS Wereldwijs (see international schools). As Carles Ballart Junyer says, they seek to base changes on evidence, to achieve improvements, and at the same time make life easier. In their adaptation of the Dutch practice, teachers form groups of experts who read scientific articles and then seek to implement the evidence they find in their classrooms. Continuous debate and classroom observations form part of these expert groups. At the moment, they focus on issues of feedback and self-regulated learning, but the practice can expand towards other challenges in the future.