When Alma teachers are in the classroom, students are on a journey: making decisions, investigating further, re-evaluating and improving their work based on new information, justifying responses, etc. Everything is a part of a process, and that process is practical, interactive, and useful in the daily lives of the students.
Therefore, when we run our teacher trainings for the region of Cusco, Peru or the departments of Beni and Tarija in Bolivia, the same holds true: the participating teachers are on a journey.
When planning a training program, whether it be 3 days or 9 months in duration, we look at the final product that the teachers need and break that into macro-steps. Those macro-steps are then broken down into micro-steps. Each micro-step product builds a piece of the macro-step product, and each macro-step product builds a piece of the final product of the training program. Therefore, we walk the teachers through the planning, implementation, and evaluation of their own long, medium, and short-term lesson plans, enriching them along the way with the strategies, techniques, and cultural based activities from Alma’s innovative teaching methodology.
The practical, interactive, step-by-step approach to Alma programs, aside from the value of the methodology itself, is one of the reasons our training programs are so popular among teachers in Peru and Bolivia. In both countries, our programs expanded so rapidly due in no small part to teacher demand. Even the teachers unions support us.
This year, we will train over 30,000 teachers, reaching 500,000 students in Peru and Bolivia. We are very excited to journey through the Alma methodology with all of them!
Ian McGroarty
Executive Director