Innovation Incubator Schools: examples of good practice

One of the main challenges for education, and more specifically for schools, is to develop a close relationship with the agents in their environment so that they too can participate in the learning process of the students. In this sense, the OSOS project, Open Schools for Open Societies, (project included in the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme 741572), works to transform the essence of education and turn schools into spaces for accelerating innovation.

Thanks to OSOS project, schools all over the world are currently implementing several initiatives for innovation and openness to the community. Becoming an open school requires transforming the culture of the school and rethinking the teaching-learning processes. It means interacting with the different agents of the environment to create projects and activities with an impact on students.

The OSOS Spain community presents in this article a series of OSOS initiatives successfully carried out in several Spanish schools. Initiatives that fight against invasive species in the landscape, intergenerational initiatives that seek to improve the physical, emotional and mental activity of ageing people, initiatives on energy poverty or climate change, recycling initiatives that involve an entire town, among others.

For each of these educational innovation initiatives, data will be presented in the paper on the number of students involved, number of teachers, actions carried out, agents with whom they have collaborated, valuation of the students, results of the scope of the initiative, evidence of the activity with the students and links to the extended description of each project.

All these innovative actions have in common the methodology of design thinking, the analysis from a scientific point of view, the resolution of real environmental problems and the impact of lasting learning among their students.

Thanks to the methodological proposal presented by OSOS, the aim is to change the culture of educational organizations and the community, not only to remain in small innovative actions, but also to prepare schools to carry out a true transformation of their way of teaching.