Maria holds a PhD in the area of Health Sciences and has experience in experimental research. She has taught in secondary education for more than 14 years and implemented and coordinated the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Aula Escola Europea. This program, founded on contemporary educational research, espouses a holistic approach to education in which both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects are given importance. She is a co-founder of Pentabilities. Pentabilities offers tools and a methodology to develop socioemotional skills through formative assessment and to visualize their progress.

Bart Verswijvel is a Belgian educator and expert trainer who works as a Senior Pedagogical Adviser for European Schoolnet in Brussels. He is the pedagogical lead of the Future Classroom Lab, the concept of a flexible learning space. He also coordinates the EUN network of Future Classroom ambassadors and the emerging network of Future Classrooms.

Bart works with Ministries of Education, schools and communities of teachers. His special interest is in whole-school approaches to stimulate active learning and innovative practices in a context of innovative learning spaces with the support of technology.

Bart promotes and investigates innovative ways of continuous professional development for teachers.

He designs and delivers online and onsite courses and workshops. Bart is an international keynote speaker and a host of Twitter chats, hackathons, webinars and Teachmeets.

Bart holds a master’s degree in Germanic Philology and a postgraduate in E-learning and Digital Didactics.

He is a co-author of several textbooks for Dutch as a mother tongue. In 2010, Bart was awarded the Queen Paola Prize for Education.

Bart’s power is to spread the joy of learning. Store your knowledge in friends, is his favourite quote.

Gabriela Rodriguez works as pedagogical manager at the Istituto Pavoniano Artigianelli of Trento, a VET school with a strong inclination towards innovation that is also part of the INDIRE movement. The degree in architecture allowed Gabriela to bring together two areas of interest: learning environments and innovative teaching. In the last years she has worked in a shared planning project led by Beate Weyland and Kuno Prey that took place in her Institute. The aim of the project was to redesign some spaces of the school starting from pedagogy . The book “Ridisegnare la scuola tra didattica, architettura e design” describes the experience of the project. She has taught in secondary school for more than 17 years. She continues to teach there and also at the University of Trento where she has a role of support to the teaching in the field of Semiotics of visual representation.She has a deep interest in design thinking, active learning approaches and the influence of the environment in the learning process.