March 23, 2026
The Education Laboratory is part of the 8th edition of the Portuguese Language Teachers' Olympics (OPLP), launched by the Ministry of Education on March 20, with the production of the booklet Learning to Study Texts: guidelines for teaching practice. The material was developed to support participating teachers and is part of the initiative's pedagogical resources, which engages teachers and students from 6th to 9th grade in public schools across the country in improving reading and writing instruction.
The booklet is based on the methodology Learning to Study Texts (AET), developed by Labedu and implemented over almost a decade in partnership with public school systems. The premise guiding the material is that producing texts of a certain genre involves mastering the necessary knowledge and strategies for reading and studying them. Therefore, it offers teachers intentional reading mediation strategies that help students understand not only what the text says, but how it says it, encompassing its organization, linguistic choices, and meaning effects.
The methodology is organized into four articulated stages (before reading, during reading, deepening reading, and after reading) that form a continuous path that strengthens deeper and critical reading comprehension. The booklet includes model lesson plans illustrating this path with a text from each of the four genres worked on in the Olympics: poem, short story, biography, and opinion article. In each case, the mediation questions, the proposed records, and the focus of the analysis are adjusted to the specificities of the genre, considering that reading a narrative text requires different strategies than those applied to an argumentative text, for example.
The presence of AET in the Olympics is based on a consolidated implementation trajectory, which in 2026 promotes teacher training in the 217 municipalities of Maranhão and 6 in Bahia. This path demonstrates how the pedagogical architecture proposed to support teachers in studying texts with students is robust enough to adapt to different genres, school levels, and institutional arrangements. Thus, it offers tools for teachers to ensure that students develop the ability to construct meaning from texts, which are central instruments for accessing the knowledge produced by society.
"AET was built on a simple but powerful premise: that language can be a tool for teaching and learning, with depth, criticality, and student protagonism. Twelve years of research and implementation, in partnership with teachers and trainers from different educational networks, show how much the model lesson plans allow for an intentional path in which students learn to think, speak, and better understand what they read, while teachers expand their didactic repertoire around reading. The Olympics offer a unique opportunity to bring this proposal to teachers throughout Brazil, and to contribute to improving the quality of learning for children and adolescents as a whole," says Nicole Paulet, executive director of Labedu.
The OPLP is part of the National School Policy for Adolescents and is technically coordinated by the Center for Open and Distance Education of the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI). In this edition, teachers of the final years of Elementary School in public schools participating in the program are invited to develop written and video reports of their practice based on the theme "The place where I live", linking students' written production to the valorization of their local communities. Registration is open until April 30 through official website of the Olympics.
Access the booklet here Learning to Study Texts: guidelines for teaching practice.
Watch the launch webinar on MEC's YouTube channel.