Training quality teachers. The challenge of design skill

Designing teaching interventions is considered one of the main skills expected of teachers, a distinctive and peculiar trait of their profession. Learning design is linked to teaching as "the description of the teaching–learning process that takes place in a learning unit" and, as such, it is assumed as a concept, a description of specific sequences, but also as techniques used to realise these sequences. After recalling the characteristics of the main educational design models as well as the cyclical process of training teachers in design skills, the present chapter describes "Eurodesign" as an explanatory example of design skills, a topic of the Italian National Teaching Training Plan (2016–2019) and a priority of the European professional development system. It focuses on the didactic model of the professional course on "European Design in the school of autonomy" – the close connection between theory (design models) and practice (project activities) in the co-participated elaboration of real intervention devices (prototypes) through simulated experience.