Thanks to the committed support from teachers and administrators last year, we not only continued but expanded, our training programs with three provinces in Cusco, Peru, and the entire Department of Beni in Bolivia, including over 8,000 teachers reaching about 180,000 students!
Here’s where we are as of the end of March 2021:
Our social-emotional wellbeing training is going strong. We began the first two groups of about 40 teachers each this month, with 4 more groups to go from the UGEL Quispicanchi and then between 6 and 8 more groups from other provinces. Demand for the program was higher than we expected so we moved two additional staff to work exclusively on the program so they can begin running the extra sessions in April. Therefore we will have three people running training sessions simultaneously to fulfill the demand. They will be busy training through the end of May when we will choose a 90 teacher focus group with whom we’ll work throughout the year. Though most of this program is focused in Peru, in Bolivia the Dirección Departamental de Educación – Beni hosted a webinar around our program which had thousands of views.
In addition, our pedagogy training programs, split into remote learning, virtual learning, tech skills within the pedagogical context, and lesson plan development according to each country’s specifications are all running strong. We are about a third of the way through our first round of theoretical and practical training in Bolivia and are wrapping the practical training on our second province in Peru this week.
We are also building an app which in the short term is an online repository of all the information in our training programs including videos, audios, text, and images that teachers can access and also download and use. We’ve been creating a lot of content for the different programs per country, course, grade level, etc. We hope to broaden the app to a full e-course which would allow us to work on an even larger scale. We also created a large online database to help us integrate different tools we are using and monitor/ stay in touch with program participants.
The Ministry of Education in Bolivia recently recognized and approved the Beni Department’s work with us, making an exception in the law that forbids them from working with NGOs based on the progress and support we have from teachers and administrators there. In Peru, we are finally able to move forward on a contract with the Region of Cusco where we can hopefully help them write a regional curriculum that would be used by all 14 UGELs.