Classroom learning and teaching for Inclusion

The classroom should be the context in which all students test their own potential day by day, enjoying those indispensable relations required to build a balanced identity between limits and possibilities, where every student can experiment their own competences. In the classroom they learn to understand themselves through their relations with others, those who participate in the social learning experience with them. Teachers should be able to place the needs of their students in relation to the learning activities promoted for and in the class, stimulating a productive and significant action of mediation between the students and the learning process. The origins of laboratory-based education lie in those authors who interpreted education as an autonomous re-construction and re-discovery of personal and social experience. John Dewey defined the image of a school that becomes a laboratory in which students can build, actively create and investigate. The teacher’s task is to encourage work among peers and foster cooperative learning groups; teachers must also be able to manage the metacognitive components conditioning learning: motivation, the beliefs students hold of themselves and their own intelligence and abilities, their sense of efficacy and the meaning they attribute to their successes and failures.