Working meeting for Curriculum Planning
Academic Director, Coordinator of the IEPC-PEC and Departmental Coordinator of Alma
“Juan Misael Saracho” Higher School of Teacher Training – Tarija
How to measure our impact is one of the questions that tops our list when developing an educational project. In Bolivia, we have gone from developing complex tests that measure the knowledge and understanding of key concepts in our workshops to working on grading the products of the training processes based on qualitative and quantitative rubrics; and even so, I believe that we never really get to measure what we have caused in our beneficiaries.
This year, we left some measurement instruments and included in the logical framework of the project direct actions that account for the impact achieved with our partner, the Higher Training Schools of Tarija and Beni. When we proposed these activities and goals in the project, we knew that we were putting a “noose around our necks” so to speak, since we were not really sure if the new authorities of these institutions would make internal changes based on our pedagogical approach, and permeating something of the entities that are dedicated to public education in Bolivia is a challenge that very few manage to achieve.
This month we have achieved something unusual even for us who were the ones who proposed it. The academic authorities of the ESFM “Juan Misael Saracho” of Tarija and the ESFM “Clara Parada de Pinto” of Trinidad, agreed to hold meetings on curricular planning and the need to standardize this document, in which it was agreed to have a unique format that serves as a guide for students of the different specialties. Thus, after several work sessions, we managed to get Alma to propose a format that was worked on based on our experience of more than three years of training public school teachers and that we have been updating according to the current educational standard.
Thus, this year, both in Beni and in Tarija, students will be taught Alma’s curricular planning, a document that guarantees that students manage to plan by articulating and harmonizing curricular content, ensuring that what is taught and evaluated is adequately linked and follows a logical sequence. But this planning format also requires that the development of the classes be shown in detail and that in this detail the pedagogical strategies that will be used to achieve the exit profiles be indicated, a space in which we seek to execute our pedagogical strategies of critical thinking and emotional education.
If this impact is maintained over time and the effect is institutionalized, it will have repercussions on several generations of future teachers in Beni and Tarija, and we believe that this action, as small as it may seem, is an essential element to achieve the change in education that we seek so much.
By:
Andrea Fernández Blacutt
Event for the Dissemination of Curricular Planning Proposals
Authorities and teachers of ESFM Clara Para de Pinto and Departmental Coordinator of Alma
Trinidad- Beni