Around the world administrators, teachers, parents, and students are beginning to step back into the classroom. Many are excited to “get back to normal” and forget about online learning. In most schools in Peru and Bolivia, due to isolated locations and lack of access to hardware, online learning was never an option to begin with. […]
I love talking to teachers. And lucky for me, I get to speak with teachers from different countries with different backgrounds and different obstacles. Hearing their enthusiasm and compassion for the students is inspiring, but one topic that always seems to deflate teachers’ energy is when we talk about the paperwork behind lesson planning, […]
Within the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021 we persevered with strength and collaborated with the UGELs of the Cusco region to offer educational proposals that “promote complex thinking through authentic activities and social-emotional well-being”. Through remote work, we interact to develop the different scheduled activities. With the experience of last year, many […]
Alma Foundation: Improving Indigenous Education in a Culturally-Responsive Manner Garfield Gini-Newman, Ian McGroarty, Alan Harman, Laura Gini-Newman Abstract: Rural Indigenous communities face significant hurdles in balancing educating children to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world while preserving their cultural values and traditional ways of life. In this chapter, the authors share […]
In our projects, we always focus on depth of impact, and to do so we need to be sure that we have strong indicators to measure student and/or teacher progress. As our state training programs grow to include more and more teachers, the effort we put into planning and measurement is even more rewarding. […]
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 […]
In Bolivia high schools follow what is called a “Bachillerato Tecnologico Humanistico” (BTH) to graduate students in different specialties depending on the choice of each school. This approach is aimed at giving high schoolers the possibility of training in a specialty that guarantees an economic livelihood when graduating and better knowledge to access […]
The pandemic’s impact on the education system in Bolivia meant that in 2020 schools were closed and that teachers, students, and parents had to face new and different challenges. The challenge of figuring out how to deliver education during an extended ban on in-person learning when there was so little access to and understanding […]
“Scaling up” was championed as a key element of success back in business school. But then, in the real world, I saw that a focus on growth and scale came with huge costs to the welfare of employees, the actual client experience, the long-term sustainability of businesses, and the health of our environment. At […]
As the 2020 school year in Peru comes to an end, we are starting to see the impact of our training programs. Of the 1,076 teachers trained in our Peruvian Distance Learning Program, after only two months: 78% observed improvement in academic performance in their students thanks to the techniques covered in the […]
We all understand that kids can’t sit down for 40 minutes and stare at a computer screen during virtual learning sessions, but we expect them to sit down for 40 minutes and stare at a whiteboard in a typical classroom. We understand that parents are busy during the pandemic and have trouble finding time to […]
“What about special education?” As we continue our teacher training in Peru and Bolivia, and as their respective Ministries of Education gain more and more confidence in Alma, we are receiving additional requests for add-ons and new proposals to address all issues in education. Problems like how to manage a virtual classroom, work with trade […]
When COVID 19 hit North America schools shut down and teachers were told to teach remotely. Few educators had experience with online education delivery and teachers began scrambling to create new lesson plans and new ways of communicating those plans. In Peru and Bolivia, the same thing happened. In Peru, a national program called “Aprender […]
One of the most interesting pieces of using our Alma methodology within the official state curriculum and adapting it to remote and virtual learning has been seeing how many obstacles to distance learning are actually just obstacles to learning exasperated by the distance. We always need to keep students engaged, always need to get parents […]
By early August, Alma will have trained over 10,000 teachers in Bolivia and Peru; helping them to connect the gap between theoretical national curriculums and practical classroom implementation, all within the context of remote and virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our distance learning proposal was adopted first by the largest province in Cusco, […]
As I write this, the number of reported cases and deaths in Peru and Bolivia is not “flattening” and the situation is dire. Trinidad, our base in Bolivia, has the highest per-capita caseload in the country and the total cases in Peru puts them 10th in the world (twice as many cases as in China). […]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Education in Peru is working hard to make sure the 2020 school year is not lost. It created a distance-learning platform called “yo aprendo en casa” (I learn at home) which broadcasts daily lesson plans for all grade levels through television, internet, and radio. In addition, the national […]
Since late last year Alma has been working with 14 educational specialists and 2,218 teachers from the UGEL Quispicanchi to use Alma’s unique teaching methodology based in local indigenous knowledge, critical and creative thinking, harmonious values, and state mandated academic competencies in order achieve the goals set forth in Peru’s national curriculum for all of […]
Iquitos is a large city in the northern jungle region of Peru. It has a high level of economic poverty clustered into three neighbourhoods in particular. That is where we support two “partner projects” and I must say that when I visited a few years ago I was struck by the difficult living conditions. COVID-19 […]
Bolivia was just put in total quarantine throughout the territory because of the coronavirus crisis. We can no longer walk about the city or live our normal routine. Representatives from the Alma Foundation in Bolivia, along with the Bolivian Police, went to drop off food and necessary goods to our Alma Alumni project, located in […]