Teachers from 10 different countries (Bulgaria, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) came together to present their experiences as Open Schooling Hubs during the first implementation phase of this European initiative. An Open Schooling Hub is an open, curious, welcoming, democratic environment that supports the development of innovative and creative projects and educational activities. It is an environment that facilitates the process for envisioning, managing and monitoring change in school settings by providing a simple and flexible framework, so that school leaders and teachers can innovate in a way appropriate for schools’ local needs. Becoming an Open Schooling Hub demands rethinking not only the pedagogy but also the structure and culture, the way we interact with stakeholders and policy makers to benefit the school projects and curricula. The Open Schooling Hubs can implement in their every day school life the OSOS accelerators proposed by the project. These accelerators are best practices that help innovative schools to proceed more and develop their innovative ideas to new localized projects. These projects could provide new solutions for the school and its community, for bringing the gap between formal and informal learning settings and creating new opportunities for personalization at different levels (student, teacher, school).
Students from Bulgaria after the award ceremony
During the event, teachers and students presented their projects that reflect the OSOS approach. It provides a powerful framework for school heads to engage, discuss and explore: how schools need to evolve, transform and reinvent; how schools facilitate open, more effective and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of educational content (both from formal and informal providers), tools and services for personalized science learning and teaching; how schools can become innovation incubators and accelerators. The main aim of the OSOS approach is to describe and implement at scale a process that facilitates the transformation of schools to innovative ecosystems, acting as shared sites of science learning for which leaders, teachers, students and the local community share responsibility, over which they share authority, and from which they all benefit through the increase of their communities’ science capital and the development of responsible citizenship.
