Escola Virolai

(Barcelona)

Our School

Together to help them grow

WHO WE ARE

Virolai is an affiliated school –with three levels from P1 to Batxillerat–, lay, inclusive, open, and respectful of the different views on life, which continually reflects, learns, and improves in response to the new challenges that it encounters. In addition, its goal is educational excellence; that is, to offer the best education to students and their families.

With a powerful Education Project based on:

ITS MISSION: “Together we help to grow”, which stresses the importance of a close collaboration between family and school to assume together the commitment to help the student in his or her learning process and personal growth.

AND ITS VALUES that, among others, include:

  • Effort and success, key elements for personal improvement

  • Self-knowledge of abilities and interests, which constitute the uniqueness of each student and which allows them to establish their own plan for personal growth

  • Learning based in experiences and feelings, in real projects in which the student is the key player in their own learning

    • Education in values: we want our students to be whole people, open to the world, feeling solidarity with others, good citizens, with a critical spirit, and capable of managing their own life and to commit to living in a better society

Its innovative spirit and commitment to continuous improvement makes the Virolai Educational Project a living project, which evolves and adapts to reality at every moment. Its main objective is to educate people with interior strength, solid abilities, and strongly rooted values so that they will continue to be able to successfully confront future challenges.

EDUCATIONAL METHODOLOGY

We want our students to leave school every day with more questions than answers. We want them to maintain their curiousity, their motivation to learn, their creativity, and the will to success and grow throughout their lives. They can do this through:

Globalized learning

The traditional division of contents does not respond to reality, which is global. We work on many of the the contents in an integrated, interdisciplinary way, based in real problems, linked in many cases to problems in our own surroundings.

Learning to solve real problems by applying knowledge

Projects in context. We have established various agreements with organizations and companies to work on what we call projects in context: globalized projects, linked to real situations in our surroundings, or to professional who help our boys and girls to value what is done in the School from the perspective of real life learning, and not just learning to pass an exam.

Collaboration and connection with the environment

We start from knowledge and a connection to what is close to us. We work to educate boys and girls rooted in their surroundings. We promote projects in learning environments linked to the world, which help the children to have a global, sustainable, and supportive vision of the world in which they live, and for which they are co-responsible.

Participationin the cultural life of the city

Participation by secondary school students in public audiences, in the Network of Sustainable Schools, or in European parliaments. They are initiatives organized on a city-wide or nationwide level that are examples of responsible participation in the life of the city, so that the students can identify with the problems in their own surroundings and develop an attitude of commitment to the search for solutions.

Incorporate invisible and continued learning

Learning must be produced continually and globally, integrating formal and informal learning. We must make the students aware of how to learn both within and outside of the school, so that they can apply these strategies throughout their lives. For this reason, it is important to accompany the student throughout the long process of learning and in the development of assessment measures that make possible the process of metacognition and self-regulation that will take the students towards autonomous learning.

Involvement of families

For this learning to be real and continuing, it is necessary for this approach to be shared between the School and the family. Learning and education are now more than ever continual processes that are reinforced by coherence and shared trust, taking advantage of all opportunities.

IMPROVEMENT GOALS:

1. To integrate the areas directly associated with STEAM in a transversal way.

2. Prioritize active methodologies in the learning of STEAM.

3. Facilitate the implementation of the pedagogical approach established in STEAM.

4. Create tools to gather evidence of the achievement of the competencies associated with STEAM by students.

5. Encourage STEAM vocations in all students regardless of their gender or social context.