"In the classroom, you can do amazing things, but you need time to avoid always giving multiple-choice exams."

Barcelona"The school system needs profound structural changes, and we've had indicators that demonstrate this for some time now." This idea was put forward by Montserrat Jiménez Vila, a teacher and principal at the Vedruna School, and it resonated with everyone present. However, once the elephant in the room has been identified, where do we begin? What do we prioritize? What needs to be renewed, and what should remain an unchanging element of Catalan classrooms? This is the reflection that four renowned professionals in the education sector shared this Tuesday at the conference. Rethinking the schoolOrganized by the Catalan Foundations Coordinator.

A conversation moderated by the director of ARA, Esther Vera, featuring Jiménez, biologist David Bueno, the director of the Montagut School, Josep Maria Lluró, and the ICREA researcher and leader of the Computational Social Sciences group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), focused on the most urgent issues, trying to avoid easy and quick solutions.

In fact, the conviction that the mission should not always be to find solutions is what Calsamiglia believes must be brought into the classroom. "We must make education a shared challenge without a final objective. We must be able to survive uncertainty," argued the ICREA researcher, who went a step further and asserted that schools need to be a "space of silence for thinking," where "the enjoyment of the process is valued" above the goal of solving problems. In the same vein, Lluró has insisted on the idea that the school "must educate desire," which, in his opinion, the school has tried to do in the last fifty years. "In the education system, we must break existing consensuses to create new ones, and we must disobey, because those who are leading us don't know where they're going," the director declared, justifying himself by pointing out that the country has undergone nine educational reforms in the last half-century. "No country can endure this. We are faced with the evidence that schools have a great future, but only if they stop being the schools of the past," he insisted.

More time to think

And to move towards the school of the future, two key factors are teacher training and time management. "It seems like everything is important, but it isn't, because otherwise, teachers don't have time for anything," warned Bueno, who emphasized the need for "school leadership teams to include time with nothing to do in their schedules so they can think, read, or call another principal to see how they approach a problem." This increased time for reflection should also allow for rethinking activities and assessment methods. "As a teacher, I'd be interested in seeing what questions a student asks in ChatGPT, for example, but, as always, more time is needed," lamented Casamiglia. "Incredible things can be done in the classroom, but time is needed to avoid always giving multiple-choice exams," he acknowledged. However, beyond simply giving them more time, the four speakers also stressed what a good teacher should be like and what they should do. "There's a lack of vocation, but also a lack of professionalism. It's not enough to simply like children to be a teacher," the director of Vedruna stated. In this regard, Lluró presented herself and other teachers as one of the factors contributing to "the enormous problem of the literacy crisis the country is experiencing." "Reading without understanding is increasingly common, but have we asked ourselves if teachers read enough and if, when we do, we understand what we read?" she asked.