Teaching for Social Innovation: What Do Teachers Need?
What does a teacher need to become an agent of social change? This is not a rhetorical question. It is the question that guided three intense days of learning and sharing in Leiria, Portugal, in March 2026, when the Polytechnic University of Leiria hosted the Short-Advanced Programme Edu4Change. Teach. Inspire. Transform. This short learning opportunity was held under the EU-SIDE Teacher Academy’s Erasmus+ Project. The answer, as it turns out, is more than knowledge. It is collaboration, experience, connection, and engagement.
Three Days That Made a Difference
For decades, teacher training has followed a familiar script: a workshop, a certificate and the return to the same classroom. Research consistently shows that this model changes very little. Teachers need something different: sustained collaboration, real challenges, and the space to experiment, fail and try again.
The EU-SIDE Teacher Academy was designed bearing this problem in mind. Rather than transmitting content about social innovation and democratic education, it creates conditions in which teachers actually live those values. The SAP in Leiria was precisely that kind of experience.
Central to the design of this SAP was a fundamental conviction: social innovation does not begin with tools or methods. It begins with values. Before teachers can foster change in their students, they need to reconnect with the foundations that make education meaningful: human dignity, equality, freedom, solidarity, democratic participation, and the belief that education is itself an act of social responsibility. This matters even more since social innovation is not a pedagogical abstraction. It is a response to real and pressing societal challenges: inclusion and integration, health and well-being, sustainable living, and digitalisation. These are the challenges that young people are already living, and that schools can no longer afford to ignore. This is why the programme started not with techniques but with questions: What do we believe education is for? What kind of society are we trying to build? And what role does each teacher play in that process?
These questions set the stage for the first real-world Challenge: the Power Cube activity. Participants were asked to reflect on which European value they believed was most under pressure today, and on what kind of power they hold, as an individual, as a colleague, as an educator, to protect and promote it. They were not given an answer. They were given time, tools, and each other – to find the answers by themselves, within themselves and with each other.
Participants from Portugal and Spain came together not as passive learners but as co-designers of change. And what each person carried into the room was strikingly different. Primary school teachers sat alongside secondary and VET educators. Practitioners with decades of experience worked next to those still shaping their professional identity. Teachers from different subject areas, institutional contexts and national backgrounds brought with them different assumptions, different challenges and different visions of what education can be. That diversity was not incidental. It was the point. Social innovation does not happen in homogeneous spaces. It emerges precisely where different perspectives meet, sometimes collide, and ultimately enrich each other.
The programme drew on Design Thinking as its central methodology, an approach that starts with empathy, moves through ideation and prototyping, and ends with something tangible. Each team left Leiria with a ready-to-use educational project plan, grounded in democratic values and social innovation competences, designed for their own schools and students.
To get there, the SAP relied on carefully designed practical workshops: dynamic, interactive and deliberately participatory. Rather than listening to lectures about collaboration, participants were placed in situations that required it. Rather than being told about empathy, they practised it. The workshops challenged them to map real social problems, prototype educational responses, test their ideas with peers from very different contexts, and revise them in light of honest feedback. The collaborative spirit was not a side effect of the programme. It was its engine.
The field trips and seminars were a particular highlight, each offering a different but complementary lens on the relationship between education and social change. At the School Museum, participants encountered the history of access to education in Portugal: the transition from the constraints of the dictatorship era to the freedoms won after 1974. Seeing how profoundly the political context shapes what happens inside a classroom was a powerful reminder of why democratic values in education cannot be taken for granted. At Escola Secundária Domingos Sequeira, the visit took a different turn. Participants toured the school and its library, and attended seminars where they were presented with real social innovation projects developed within the school community. Here, social innovation was not abstract or theoretical. It was alive, local and driven.
What Teachers Said They Needed
The conversations throughout the SAP were candid. Teachers spoke about the gap between the values they hold and the constraints they face: rigid curricula, limited time, institutional resistance. But they also spoke about what ignites change: the small victory that makes the next one possible.
What emerged was a portrait of the socially innovative teacher: not a superhero, but a reflective practitioner who asks difficult questions, listens carefully, and builds bridges between disciplines, between generations, and between school and society.
Democratic Values Are Not Optional
Underlying everything was a conviction that democratic education is not a subject to be taught but a way of being in the classroom. The EU-SIDE Social Innovation Competence Framework gave participants a shared language for this, connecting values like human dignity, equality and active participation to concrete pedagogical choices.
One of the most important goals of the SAP was precisely this: to help teachers see themselves differently. Not simply as deliverers of curriculum, but as agents of change. Each pedagogical decision, each classroom interaction, each project designed with students, is also a small act of social and democratic construction. Raising teachers’ awareness of this role was not an abstract exercise in motivation. It was a deliberate design choice, rooted in the understanding that social innovation in education cannot happen without educators who believe in their own capacity to make a difference, and who have the competences, the confidence and the community to act on that belief.
In a European context where democratic culture is under pressure, this matters enormously. Teachers who understand why democracy requires daily practice, not just occasional celebration, are among its most important guardians.
Cascade Begins
The SAP ended with group presentations and a closing reflection on how didactic practices should be changed in order to better incorporate and develop social innovation. But in a deeper sense, it did not end at all. Each participant returned to their school carrying a project, a network and a renewed sense of purpose This is what the EU-SIDE Teacher Academy calls the cascade effect: the quiet multiplication of democratic values, one classroom at a time.
But the cascade is not only local. The EU-SIDE project was built from the outset around the creation of an international community of practice: a living network of teachers and education stakeholders committed to transnational collaboration, mutual learning and shared innovation. What began in Leiria is part of a much larger movement, one classroom, one school, one country at a time.
Coming back to the question we began with: what does a teacher need to teach for social innovation?
Based on what happened in Leiria, the answer is this: a real challenge, genuine collaboration, time to think, and the confidence that what they do in their classroom matters beyond it. That is what Edu4Change was designed to provide.
Susana Sardinha Monteiro | Politechnic University of Leiria
