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In the first half of the Portuguese Education Summit we visited two schools, which you can read about here.

In the second half, we visited two more schools.First a description of each school, and then conclusions after the four visits.

The Colégio Novo de Coimbra is located just outside the old city of Coimbra. The facility supports 2 career education schools and an elder care facility in addition to the pre-school and elementary school. Paulo Manuel Henriques Lopes Saraiva Santos and Beatriz dos Santos Cunha Saraiva, run the entire complex.

Many schools pay lip service to the whole child, or to the need to address emotional wellbeing, physical health, cognitive challenges, and social interaction. Colégio Novo integrates all four all day long. Take the activity below.

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What can you build into a Lego activity for 5-year olds:

• Small motor skills
• Following directions and algorithms
• Colors
• Shapes and geometry
• Math
• Collaboration, including helping others, being helped, and sharing

The adults in this picture are fellow participants in the Portugal Education Summit. The children, who speak very little English, are explaining to the adults, who speak no Portuguese, how they are using math and shapes to build the desired design. Language turns out not to be a barrier when you are curious, having fun, and share a common goal. Actually, who is having more fun and learning more, the kids or the adults?

Paulo and Beatriz have built the most magnificent facilities with parkland and trails, athletic fields, communication and media hub, horse stables, swimming pools, and arts and music lofts. Students and teachers develop plans for students to pursue their passions. Students learn through collaborative projects that take advantage of the facilities. They learn about biological and weather cycles in different micro-climates in the surrounding parks, in the pool they are learning physics principles as they are exercising. Art, performing arts, and music are blended with language, history, science, and math.

Colegio Novo faces the same issues that progressive schools face in most areas. The education establishment is defensive; this is a change from the ways that “have worked” for over 50 years. Parents are skeptical, this is not the way they learned, and they turned out alright, and parents also fear that unless their kids learn the traditional ways, they will be left behind.

But the kids, as they age out of the elementary school program have proven to shine; they actually are more advanced in the core academic subjects, and they are self-directed and self-motivated. This year, enrollment and applications increased by 50%.

Colégio Santa Eulália is about 20 miles west of Porto. The school covers birth to 4th grade, and also has a facility for elder care and houses about 20 foster children.

We all discussed how to summarize the environment of Santa Eulália, and the word joy surfaced a lot. Children, staff, elder residents were all joyful. But safety and belonging may be even better terms. Everyone knew that they were accepted and valued for who they were, and you could see the deliberate efforts to make everyone feel that they could rely on each other. The children brought joy and a sense of family to the elder residents. The elders brought stories to the children. When a student did not participate in an activity, they were still accepted.

Madeleine Malta’s vision focuses on an educational process that values ​​the intergenerational component and that mobilizes, in a multidisciplinary way, the various skills of the student. To train students from a multidimensional perspective, in a context of excellence, aiming at their integral development (knowing how to be, knowing how to behave, knowing how to do, knowing how to become).

The are so many examples, but here is one:
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These are 1st graders learning about the water cycle, not by reading a book or listening to a lecture, but by exploring questions about the fish pond at the school:

• How did the water get there?
• Where does the water go?
• How do the plants use the water?
• What nutrients do the plants use?
• What do the fish eat?

As you can see, each of these schools is somewhat different. The private schools have more freedom and resources. Two of the schools include elder care and find ways for the students and elders to benefit from each other. Some facilities are only for early elementary, while others go through high school.

And there are certain similarities that we can all learn from:

• Children learn through projects that they care about and which are not limited by discipline, there are no math projects or history projects, there are projects relevant to the children’s interest.
• Joy and belonging are foundational. Kids, teachers, and staff love being there.That’s not by accident, it’s by design and through a lot of effort. Each school had to overcome many obstacles, financial, community pressure, educational establishment opposition, but they keep on coming back.
• Clear delineation of roles:
  • The job of children is to be children, they are not raw materials that need to be molded into adults or inputs to a testing regime, even though they tend to do well on tests. They are to follow the natural human desire to learn, to interact, to solve problems, and to have fun.
  • Teachers are allowed to be happy; they understand the overall goal, they have the technology support, they are given time to socialize with other teachers, they are granted the authority to work with their students, and results are used as feedback not as the basis for rewards or punishments.
• Physical well being, emotional well being, arts, music, and physical activity are part of every day.
• Technology is regarded as a tool to support the goals and used as part of the pedagogy to make it easier for students to complete projects and for teachers to assess how students are doing. Technology is not the goal; student engagement, wellbeing, and engagement are. Within what the school can afford, If technology can help, it’s used, and if it isn’t helping, it’s not used..

This is the third year we have participated in an international education summit for 8-20 people. The first year was in Finland, and the last two have been in Portugal. We’ve all found them very worthwhile. We will probably conduct one next year as well. The learning and cultural exchanges are very rich.

By the way, view upcoming Mindshifting classes here.

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