University-School Collaborative Networks: A Strategy to Improve the Professional Skills of Future Teachers

This paper presents an experiment in teaching innovation developed at the University of Cordoba's Faculty of Education (Spain), in the second year of the Infant Education Teacher Training course, within the subject of general didactics. The innovative approach taken focused on setting up a collaborative network between infants' schools and the university. Taking Project Work as the central axis, a learning network has been built with the participation of sixteen Infant Education teachers, three hundred twenty children from this stage, seven university teachers, eighty-five trainee teachers, and two Infant Education advisers from a continuing professional development centre for teachers. The theoretical foundations that support this experiment are described along with their different stages, evaluating the benefits of each of them in facilitating the acquisition of professional competences among university students