This paper presents a C 0 8-node quadrilateral finite element (FE) for geometrically linear piezoelectric plates/shells. It is based on a high-order kinematics proposed in [1] for the mechanical part. Furthermore, Murakami's ZigZag Function [2] is superimposed for the three displacement components for improving the accuracy for multilayered modeling. The approximation of the electric potential must be able to model piezoelectric patches, and a constant value is considered on each elementary domain while a cubic variation in each layer is used, based on the polynomial expansion given in [3]. A plate/shell FE is finally deduced with nine degrees of freedom (dof) per node for the mechanical part, twelve dofs if the ZigZag functions are included [4] and, for the layerwise description of the piezoelectric behavior, three additional dof per element and per layer are added. This FE is evaluated on two piezoelectric plate/shell tests including sensor and actuator configurations. The role of electrode segmentation, i.e. the size of equipotential surfaces, on the electro-mechanical response has been also considered.