ACTIVE METHODOLOGY IN THE DIDACTIC TRAINING OF MASTERS AND DOCTORS: A DIFFERENTIATED PRACTICE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRANSVERSAL COMPETENCES M.A. Motta Barreto, E.J. Candido Moraes, D.S. Giordani EEL-USP (BRAZIL) Abstract Our society has undergone countless and varied influences coming from the scientific, technological and sociological scope. These influences reshape the behavior and motivation of young people, which points to the increasingly urgent need to train professionals with a critical capacity to properly analyze the messages they receive and to make responsible decisions at all levels. Being an inherent process of society, teaching is impelled to reformulate old practices, from basic to advanced levels. In this trend, it is fundamental that the university environment be stimulating and replace practices of exclusive transmission of knowledge. Thus, new teaching practices have been developed in recent years. Based on several of them, this work had the objective of reporting an experience of didactic- pedagogical training of future masters and doctors in the area of engineering, sensitizing them to issues related to new methodologies of teaching and learning, from their own experiences with a differentiated method. This is a program of the University of São Paulo, applied at the School of Engineering of Lorena, where the programmatic content is put into practice in an unusual way. The results, obtained from the statements of graduates of the discipline, indicate a great acceptance of the practice and perception of real development of abilities favorable to the current demands of teaching excellence. Keywords: active methodologies, higher teaching, transversal competences, teaching-learning process. 1 INTRODUCTION The current society is changing at a very fast pace, which is due, in large part, to the great amount of information transmitted by all the media. This is reflected directly in the teaching process, at various levels, from the basic to the higher and, in our case, at the graduate level, is also similar. Due to these changes, the teaching-learning process has been remodeled and can no longer be restricted to the traditional methods used, often indiscriminately. Starting from the traditional teaching model, where the teacher holds the knowledge to be transmitted and the students are passive receivers of contents, often separated from their everyday reality, we have been, in the last decades, moving towards the consideration of more innovative aspects of educational practices. The emphasis on promoting information-based learning may have been appropriate for previous generations, but fails to meet the demands of students in this contemporary society [1]. Particularly in the area of sciences, it is necessary to emphasize and train problem solving, scientific thinking, the use of multiple languages and argumentation [2], which requires the use of new teaching strategies. Thus, thinking about the professional training of young people who will soon enter the world of work, it is necessary to promote, more and more, the approximation of academic reality with the reality of the labor market outside the university. Significant learning, according to Auzubel [3], becomes a goal in the various teaching practices. In the case of professionals who will be in contact and in action in the training of other professionals, since these are future masters and doctors who will follow the academic career, which involves research and teaching, care must be taken so they can develop critical thinking, creativity, cooperative work, and other skills, called transversal. Such competencies can be recognized as a grouping of resources that can be triggered to solve various problems, considering the integration of the cognitive, emotional and social dimensions. Such grouping encompasses theoretical knowledge, diverse personal resources and ethical principles duly situated in the context to be considered [4], [5], [6], [7]. In order to achieve the objective of favoring the development of such competences, it is fundamental that the differentiated teaching practice is established, more and more, based on the concept that the Proceedings of EDULEARN19 Conference 1st-3rd July 2019, Palma, Mallorca, Spain ISBN: 978-84-09-12031-4 7958