Istituto Statale per l’Istruzione Superiore

ISIS EUROPA has been revised according to the school reform. It became Higher Institute of State Education, whose training offer is: Technical Institute with the following specializations: “Tourism”, “Graphics and web design” and vocational as “Health- care Service” and “Commercial Services”. It includes about 1372 pupils, 200 teachers, and 40 employees among administrative and staff. ISIS Europa is the leader in the Educational Avant-garde INDIRE, a movement of innovation that leads to the system experiences of good practices in the production of digital educational content. Since last school year, ISIS Europa met Harvard Graduate School of Education because our school has been chosen from INDIRE to take part in a pilot project –Project Zero – “MLTV” “Making Learning Thinking Visible” together with two schools in Italy.

ISIS Europa has 4 school complexes all supplied with wifi and fiber optic connections, where there are several laboratories: physics, chemistry, computer science, language, etc. In addition, all classrooms are equipped with projectors, Interactive Boards and PC. ISIS Europa is experiencing many years of activities to develop new methodologies to foster learning achievement, to refurbish its formal learning and evaluative activities. Our school is located in Pomigliano d’Arco, a district affected by high unemployment rate and a large percentage of crime, it hosts many pupils who did not benefit from the trust of school chances to apply into the labor market, so they were discouraged, their motivation was decreasing. Moreover, their levels of incoming and outgoing competences were inadequate and also their lacking perception of self-efficacy caused a high rate of early school leaving especially into the first two years.

All the disciplines, in fact, are involved in the process of compiling training paths that are primarily aimed at developing a focus competence, chosen among the European key competences. Outline and constant use of social and digital learning tools inside and outside classes is crucial in order to get pupils deeply involved in the learning process, ( our website, web learning platform and our App so that everyone can be informed in real-time about the school news and activities).

In addition, teachers can adopt evaluation tools able to test knowledge and skills and even the cognitive and metacognitive processes that each pupil enacts to face real “situation -problem ” to solve. The class and its inner activities are thus somehow “flipped”, as class is no longer a place for the transmission of notions but work and debate space where each one learns to use the research outcomes and products. Projects such as “Pills of knowledge” and “Classrooms at an exibition” have seen our pupils becoming enthusiastic protagonists, actively involved and extremely motivated in the production of the highest quality level artifacts, having succeeded to appreciate their learning potential beyond their own expectations.