Editorial

Abstract

This publication is part of the first intellectual output of the BE-COMS ERASMUS + project Building Competences at School , an Erasmus+ Small Call partnership in school education - project no. 2021-2-IT02-KA210-SCH-000050392. The project intended to promote European citizenship, digital culture, and competences for teaching and learning in the digital era.
The Covid emergency has strongly impacted education systems, teaching and learning. In addition, it is important to underline the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning , which impacts curricula and methodology. Some research (Capogna et al., 2021) realised during the Covid pandemia has shown that, despite the difficulties of the emergency, educational institutions of all levels and fields have been able to be resilient, responsibly ensuring operational continuity, albeit with the awareness of existing limits. This continuity has made it possible to support students and families in their growth path, proving to be the last bastion for normality and individual and social well-being. Adapting educational agencies to the digital challenge depends on a significant review of the processes and organisational and educational systems and on the awareness that digital innovation is, first and foremost, an issue of policy that cannot be trivially returned to the teacher responsibility or technological issues. The emergency showed therelevance of School Leaders and the centrality of thei  management and empowering leadership skills to manage the emergency. New approaches to Teacher Professional Development (TPD) have highlighted the need to focus on a set of key components to provide effective TPD at scale, such as professional learning support, collaboration and reflection with peers, a variety of formats and platforms to make content available for different contexts, peer evaluation or a career-oriented strategy for professional learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017, TPD@Coalition for the Global South, 2021). For this reason, the special issue launched under the BE-COMS project aimed to open a field of discussion around these crucial topics for the future of the education system.