Curriculum Planning Workshop – UA Tarija and ESFM Canasmoro students – August 2023
We are in the last training sessions for students at the Higher School for Teacher Training in the department of Tarija. This year we work with students for the first time and although it has been a new experience it has also been a very rewarding experience. We train students who are between the first and fifth year of training, that is, they are mostly between 17 and 23 years old; Due to the number of students and the dispersion of schedules and venues, we agreed to hold only virtual workshops, we had more than 300 attendees in several of our training events and a higher than expected participation according to our records from past years.
Within the training process of these students, training is provided on the development of the Curricular Development Plan -PDC, an instrument of lesson planning that each teacher must carry out when working in the classroom. Students learn this from various teachers throughout their career and carry out, from the second year, institutional practices that range from mere observation of classes to the implementation of PDC’s and development of classes in real classrooms of public schools in the surroundings.
In these last workshops we had the opportunity to talk a little more about their experience in practices and their main needs in regards to planning. Regarding this, many commented that there is no planning format in the classrooms they visit, many asserted that some teachers plan for a week, others for the whole year, others have past PDC’s and others do not even plan and even in the ESFM itself Teachers handle different planning formats, therefore, one year they do a PDC in a certain way and the next that format is no longer valid. Given this, his central question in the workshop was: Is there an official curriculum planning format delivered by the Ministry of Education?We are sorry to answer that that certainly does not exist. However, it was very useful for the students to know that Alma investigated the Ministry’s new 2023 curricular guidelines in detail and, in accordance with the sections that are required to be included for online teacher planning, a generic and unified format for teachers has been built from Alma. PDC for the three levels of training that, although it does not represent an official format, serves as a guide for the work of teachers and has also been accompanied by a filling guide that guarantees compliance with the requirements of the Ministry of Education. Undoubtedly at the end of the workshop, the entire Tarija team realized how important the work carried out by Alma has been to respond with guides and instruments to the needs of current teachers and of course the students who will be teachers of our schools in the future. classrooms.
By:
Zorana Sfarcich Rojas
Tarija-Bolivia Coordinator