This project aimed at helping teachers in Agrupamento de Escolas de Vila Verde enhance their personal and professional profile, exploring innovative teaching practices to improve learning by means of a multicultural environment. Besides improving pedagogical and didactical skills, teachers were also able to develop their linguistic skills, as far as the English language is concerned, as an essential tool to access professional, cultural and intercultural knowledge. Besides, it was also the aim of the project that teachers be the school’s generator of the ability to cooperate at an international level, encouraging the partaking of good teaching practices, material and ideas among European partners and national teams, as well as the sponsors of changes in educational approaches and practices. These are the specific aims of the project: 1) to enhance competencies that allow for the exploration of the benefits of the CLIL methodology so as to revolutionize teaching strategies capable of developing transversal skills; 2) to enhance relevant skills such as creativity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and other key competencies through the use of innovative methodologies, including CLIL; 3) to meet teachers from different European nationalities, promoting the involvement in intercultural learning experiences and the construction of a network of international cooperation for the future; 4) to increase language skills within the school community, in order to involve them in international projects, as well as to promote the linguistic diversity in the European Union; 4) to develop students' motivation, confidence, and communication skills in all levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), bearing also in mind intercultural skills within a multilinguistic, multicultural, and interactive Europe; 5) to disseminate innovative practices through peer training; 6) to promote school internationalization through the establishment of a network of partnerships.
Research literature has been acknowledging the need to adapt pedagogical methodologies to the characteristics of the XXI century. Within an information and a communication economy and society, students should develop key competencies in order to be successful as future citizens in an increasingly volatile world. In light of this, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity emerge as super-competencies. Nevertheless, their development is not compliant with teacher-centered and traditional classroom or curricular practices. On the contrary, one supports the use of innovative pedagogical practices able to promote an active learning through innovative environments which fit the demands of a humanist educational paradigm. In this context, one highlights methodologies such as the flipped classroom, blended learning, project-based learning, digital learning, gamification, and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), etc. This is assumed as not only as an innovative teaching and learning methodology to the promotion of linguistic proficiency in a foreign language, but also as a tool for inclusive and intercultural education. Thus, the adoption of this methodology may allow the school to rethink the teaching and learning of foreign languages. We believe that the school's involvement in this project was pivotal to meeting a vision of an innovative and a humanistic education as established in the law (with the emphasis placed on the Perfil dos Alunos à Saída da Escolaridade Obrigatória) and commended in the School's Educational Project whose motto is inclusion, innovation, integrity and interdisciplinarity.