Principles

Most schools have very similar purposes, curricula, assessment systems, and textbooks. Teaching is fairly similar across the country's schools, and fairly similar subjects are taught across educational institutions.

Globally, something relatively similar happens, and a few years ago it was estimated that 95% of schools were guided by fairly traditional pedagogical approaches and models, including most schools in industrialized countries. The main exception is Northern European countries, where primary and secondary education has changed significantly in recent decades, allowing for the emergence of programs that focus more on student understanding and on interaction and dialogue between students and teachers.

A pedagogical innovation arises when there is significant dissatisfaction with the purposes, content, teaching methods, sequences, textbooks, or assessment systems of traditional schools. Consequently, a pedagogical innovation implies a different way of thinking, organizing, and working in schools. In this way, innovation creates new ways of thinking and doing in education.

Innovators test other ways of organizing schools, other content, other methodologies, other textbooks, and other assessment systems. It's about finding models and ways to learn and teach that differ from those used for centuries by traditional schools.

The active school, for example, represented a profound pedagogical innovation at the beginning of the 20th century because it sought to teach based on the experiences, experiences, and interests of the students themselves. It innovated methodologies, created workshops and field trips, and incorporated crafts, museums, and laboratories into the classroom. Thus, the active school represented a profound pedagogical innovation at the time, although it was implemented in only a few schools in Colombia, Latin America, and the entire world. The main purpose it assigned to school was to achieve happiness and promote children's socialization, rather than the pursuit of learning.

However, at the beginning of the 21st century, in a globalized, flexible, and ever-changing world, interconnected by powerful information networks and dominated by images and virtual realities, the thesis of defending experience and lived experience does not represent the innovation that schools need today, nor the innovation required to prepare children and young people to live better in the century that is just beginning. Today, we need a school that develops thought, creativity, autonomy, understanding, and an interest in knowledge. Therefore, we need new pedagogical models that respond to the needs of the 21st century. A profound transformation of the school system we have all known for a long time is required, and which remains largely dominant in Colombia and Latin America.