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Location: Benidorm, Spain / Number of students: 225
Grades using Innovamat: From 1st grade to 9th grade/ Using Innovamat since: 2020
Colegio Lope de Vega is an international school located in Benidorm, Valencia. After working with the Innovamat curriculum for a while, we wanted to hear the experience and testimonies of teachers and students to hear about their process of change.
Manuel Valero, middle school teacher and head of the math department.
One aspect that the school highlighted most, commented Mercedes Sánchez, 8th grade math teacher, is that it is a very innovative curriculum, which works on math in a very different way to what had been done until now. This innovative approach has succeeded in winning students’ interest and making learning math more accessible and exciting.
According to Manuel Valero, middle school teacher and head of the math department:
“Innovamat is a program of activities that works onall the processes that make a person mathematically competent.”
Innovamat’s curriculum has therefore helped the school to work on mathematics in a different way, empowering students to analyze, conjecture, argue, test, etc., Valero said. Ultimately, the curriculum encourages the development of essential math skills and promotes effective thinking and communication.
For her part, Davinia Gómez, elementary teacher and coordinator, highlights a generalized growth in motivation, both by students and teachers. Innovamat has managed to awaken enthusiasm and commitment to the learning process, generating an environment of collaboration and constant improvement. This can be seen in Emma, an elementary student who says that once she learns something new, she doesn’t forget it.
But not only are students excited about the curriculum, teachers are too. The curriculum has helped them to further improve their teaching. Eva Rodríguez, a 3rd grade teacher, recommends that other schools implement the curriculum because they are seeing good results from students, teachers and families.
We also wanted to hear the families’ opinion of the curriculum to understand what they have observed in their children. They told us that, little by little, they understand the curriculum and this new way of teaching math. And they are in no doubt that see great progress in their children, as they are not only more motivated, but now they understand math as more than just mechanizing algorithms.
Mayte García, mother of a student at the school, has witnessed the positive impact Innovamat has had on her daughter’s learning, and is surprised at how quickly she solves the problems she works on. “She does exercises on the platform that I find difficult to solve myself. I stand next to her and say, How did you do that so quickly?” She told us.
One of the values that Davinia highlights as coordinator is that Innovamat not only provides students with tools, but also involves families in their children’s learning process, offering them different resources such as video tutorials, activities, etc. She explained that “Innovamat offers videos for parents on the classroom manager to help them understand from home how their children work in the classroom”.
This has helped parents like Encarna Martínez, mother of a 7th grader, understand Innovamat’s educational approach. She is now aware that the curriculum aims to teach mathematics in a different, much more competency-based way.
“Innovamat helps them understand math by using very playful examples. Then they get more involved, and they get more involved because they understand more,” she said.
This gives them a lot of excitement and motivation for learning, which, as Elisa Casado, elementary teacher, says, “is fundamental, because without emotion, there is no learning”.
Lastly, Rosa, mother of another elementary student, concludes with a reflection on her own experience with mathematics and how Innovamat would have transformed her learning: “I mostly taught myself math because it used to be the same old, predictable stuff.
[…] And, of course,I would have loved to have been taught mathematics like this.“
