St Peter’s School: a step further in education

St.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
22 January 2024 Monday 10:15
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St Peter’s School: a step further in education

St. Peter's is the only school in Catalonia that introduces futures literacy in a transversal way, that is, the development of skills to identify signs of change and predict future scenarios. The objective is to enable students to make better decisions, those that bring us closer to an optimistic vision of the future, a vision that implies strategy and action. It is the only school in Barcelona that offers in its curriculum pioneering projects and subjects such as prompt engineering and ethics on scientific-technological progress. It considers mathematics as a fundamental language, and places special emphasis on the preparation of reading comprehension and the development of the capacity for critical analysis.

Hand in hand with neuroscience, attention, curiosity, executive control and the capacity for inhibition are worked on in a transversal manner in early childhood education. Learning goes hand in hand with play, at a stage in which the IB methodology is already introduced, based on inquiry and the use of transferable concepts between different areas. Mathematics, language acquisition and scientific curiosity are fundamental pillars in this stage, in which critical ability is encouraged through questions. In their 0-5 Laboratory, children learn to formulate their first scientific hypotheses.

Mathematics is introduced through manipulation and visualization, in small microlearning doses that allow you to alternate, from a young age, probability, geometry, calculus or arithmetic. This approach takes into account the attention span at an early age, which is why it considers breaks as essential to feed curiosity.

At St Peter's, language is worked on with the aim of preparing students to become critical analysts of reality. Through reading groups and conferences, comprehension skills and the ability to question what has been read are developed, both in literature and in any discipline. One of its pillars, factfulness, aims to equip students with a set of critical skills that question any statement not based on evidence.

St Peter's School is a pioneer school in the use of artificial intelligence in education: both in the design of subjects (prompt engineering, interdisciplinary units, programming) and in the adoption of tools such as ChatGTP within the classroom, or as a teaching assistant . But St Peter's goes one step further in this accelerationist vision and introduces philosophical and ethical reflection on the exponential changes that will revolutionize life, work and human identity. It is essential to consider what type of intelligence (artificial, synthetic, even alien) we will coexist with in the not distant future.