The Istituto Comprensivo “E. Berlinguer” is a state school based in Ragusa, a medium-size town in south-east Sicily. Most of our students live in the surrounding area which is a mixture of different social backgrounds. Our institute includes different school levels: there are 13 classes of infant school, 17 classes of primary school, and 9 classes of Scuola Secondaria Superiore di 1° Grado (which is a three-year lower secondary school before entering the five-year higher secondary school).
There are 900 pupils and about 70 teachers in all. A group of 8 teachers cooperates with our headteacher for a wide range of educational and teaching activities which affect and involve the entire province of Ragusa.
Our school has also played a pivotal role regarding local training teacher services, evaluation, monitoring and assessment of teaching, course organization and experimental workshops. It is actually the head of a school network system which covers an area of schools belonging to half our province. Promoting new teaching methods, introducing the use of TIC and the implementation of teaching methods for foreign languages have always been among our most important concerns. As far as the evaluation system is concerned, our school has always cooperated with INVALSI (the national state school evaluation system promoted by the Italian Ministry of Education – M.I.U.R.) with special concern about the recruitment of special observer teachers to be employed during the
INVALSI evaluation sessions in the provinces of Ragusa and Siracusa.
Our institute has also developed internal and external cooperation work with local universities, such as the University of Enna: it is actually one of the few Sicilian schools which has experimented and designed new teaching units developed by the faculty of Primary Education of the University of Enna.
In all our classes, teachers work to develop computational thinking through coding in a game context; in this school year, the school won a national prize for coding activities. All our students participate in extracurricular projects to deepen the English language and to develop citizenship skills financed with European funds. Our teachers are involved in training activities for the development of language skills and digital skills. The activities carried out for the Erasmus project “Transport in the past, present and future”, coordinated by Scoil Sheamais Naofa, Bearna (Ireland) have enabled the development of environmental issues and the safeguarding of cultural and natural heritage in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).