Esta es una guía informativa para maestros sobre Fondos del Conocimiento y su aplicación en el aula. Los Fondos del Conocimiento hacen referencia al cúmulo de habilidades, experiencias y conocimientos de los estudiantes adquiridos en la vida cotidiana. En esta guía se enfatiza que este tipo de referentes son significativos, pues ayudan a los maestros para aprender sobre sus estudiantes y sus hogares, para reconocer fundamentos particulares de conocimiento aplicables en un entorno escolar. Esta guía fue elaborada por el equipo técnico del Centro de Investigaciones Educativas de la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, socio implementador de Educación Básica de Calidad para la Transición (Basic Education Quality and Transitions - BEQT, por sus siglas en inglés).

Esta es una guía informativa para maestros sobre el Diseño Universal para el Aprendizaje (DUA). El término DUA alude a un marco científicamente válido para guiar la práctica educativa que: a) proporciona flexibilidad en las formas en las que se presenta la información y en las que el estudiante demuestra su conocimiento de acuerdo a su motivación; b) reduce las barreras adaptándose al estudiante y manteniendo altas expectativas para todos los estudiantes en el aula. Esta guía fue elaborada por el equipo técnico del Centro de Investigaciones Educativas de la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, socio implementador de Educación Básica de Calidad para la Transición (Basic Education Quality and Transitions - BEQT, por sus siglas en inglés).

La educación básica en Guatemala enfrenta retos significativos, incluyendo altas tasas de deserción escolar y habilidades básicas insuficientemente desarrolladas. Estos problemas se acentúan en los grupos vulnerables como son los estudiantes de áreas rurales, niñas y personas con discapacidad. La pandemia de COVID-19 ha exacerbado aún más estos desafíos al exponer las carencias en recursos y acceso tecnológico. Mediante un acuerdo con USAID, RTI International colabora con diversas instituciones locales, como Fundación de la Caficultura para el Desarrollo Rural (Funcafé), Universidad del Valle Guatemala (UVG), Fundación Sergio Paiz Andrade (Funsepa) y Wayfree implementando el proyecto Educación Básica de Calidad para la Transición (Basic Education Quality and Transitions -BEQT) para mejorar la adquisición de destrezas básicas de lectoescritura, matemáticas y habilidades socioemocionales, y promover la transición de estudiantes de primaria al ciclo básico. Educación Básica de Calidad para la Transición se enfoca en estudiantes de cuarto a sexto de primaria y primero básico en doce municipios priorizados de los departamentos de: Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Quiché, y Baja Verapaz. Para identificar las barreras de transición educativa desde los actores clave locales, RTI y Funcafé llevaron a cabo un estudio cualitativo en seis de los doce municipios de intervención del proyecto, enfocándose en aquellos con altos índices de inasistencia escolar, migrantes retornados y población indígena. Se realizaron 46 entrevistas y 25 grupos focales con diversos actores clave, desde jóvenes y padres hasta directores de escuelas e institutos.

Presentation showcases findings about specific social and emotional skills and their in individual relationships to academic achievement. Importantly, these findings highlight the possible link between inequalities in academic achievement being attributed to the inequalities in SEL. These findings will be published in UNESCO GEMR Spotlight Series 2024.

The twin crises of high dropout rates and weak foundational skills risk a lost generation of youth in Guatemala and Honduras. To respond to these crises, RTI is working with the Ministry of Education to support students to complete their education by strengthening system capacity to use data to identify students at risk of dropping out, to provide psychosocial support, and to address barriers to accessing secondary school. Motivating this effort is the belief that improved education outcomes will lead to secure employment and steady incomes in the future, weakening the primary drivers of irregular migration. Building on past efforts in dropout prevention (World Bank 2021; Unesco 2022), we have developed and deployed an open-source mobile application to teachers’ devices that will both facilitate data collection and display easily understandable information on the three pillars of dropout prevention: Attendance, Behavior and Coursework (ABC). The application enables teachers to track daily attendance, behavior and track and import coursework performance including test results and class grades. The data are used by the teacher to inform the need for additional intervention. Anonymized and aggregated data are shared at the school, municipal and ministry level, which we expect will reduce teacher fears of punitive accountability. The application works offline and syncs to the cloud once a WiFi or data connection is made. Free community Wi-Fi and school-based internet connectivity will improve teacher’s ability to access the application and other education data, resources and tools while also improving digital inclusion for students to access online learning opportunities and resources. At CIES, we hope to respond to Sub-theme question 3.3: How can school systems be better prepared to adapt to and to combat disruptions such as natural disasters and the COVID pandemic? The ongoing experience of both Guatemala and Honduras in managing COVID has been characterized by extended school closures, limited access to online materials, and increased dropout and irregular migration. We hope to learn from current and past NGO and Ministry experiences in creating digital tools that support teachers but can also be used to identify and respond to system-level challenges and improve system resilience. How have these digital tools helped teachers and system leaders to understand gaps in student learning and risk of drop-out? What level of anonymity has proved sufficient to overcome teacher accountability fears but adequate to inform system-level needs? Can improved digital inclusion and access to online learning help systems to become more resilient to disruptions? We anticipate a lively discussion on the potential and limitations of data-driven dropout prevention systems, several of which have been piloted by Ministries of Education in Latin America with the support of the World Bank, USAID and other organizations. By the time of the CIES presentation in March we expect to have piloted the tool in schools in 12 municipalities and have initial feedback from teachers and school leaders as to the user experience, feasibility and desirability of the tool.

Too often, teachers are subject to top-down policies, procedures, and pedagogies that either bear little resemblance to their day-to-day experience or are so numerous as to be overwhelming in the face of their other responsibilities. When this occurs, teachers often resist these top-down approaches, instead opting to figure things out on their own, or creating their own hybrid approaches that are acceptable according to local social norms. For example, King and his colleagues (2022) found that while teachers adopted effective reading program content, they often retained their previous, less effective pedagogies; teachers utilized a heuristic short-cut requiring lower mental effort to implement the program while upholding social norms in the school. When teachers fail to adopt new and effective instructional reforms, learners don’t access the benefits of the improved instruction and the impact on learning outcomes is minimized. This situation may explain findings from Nepal, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, where 80% of the impact from early grade reading (EGR) interventions is explained by just 13% to 34% of schools, depending on the country context (King et al., 2022). What can be done to increase the uptake of interventions in LMICs? Research on educational change and the diffusion of innovation suggest peer-to-peer learning can be a powerful way to enhance the diffusion of information and provide the support teachers need to adopt new methodologies – and can be more effective than top-down approaches for changing behavior (Fullan, 2015; Daly et al., 2010). Through peer-to-peer interactions, individuals develop social capital, the resources through which information and trust are exchanged and can be called upon to support the successful adoption of innovation and new methodologies. We will present findings from a study (October 2022-September 2023) conducted in collaboration with USAID/Tanzania Jifunze Uelewe Project that seeks to better understand the ways in which teacher peer-to-peer transmission of information, ideas, and support in Tanzania harness that power of social capital to more efficiently diffuse effective pedagogies and support their application in the classroom. Utilizing social network analysis (SNA) combined with key informant interviews, we studied how teacher-influencers and the density of teacher social networks and formal school structures for teacher communication and collaboration (e.g., communities of practice) promote or impede adoption. In this presentation we will seek to accomplish the following objectives: Present findings on the role that teacher social networks and formal school structures for communication and collaboration can play in supporting or impeding uptake of education interventions. Provide a framework for practitioners to enhance teacher peer interactions within and across schools to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of education change innovations. By better understanding the mechanisms of teacher peer interactions and learning in LMICs – such as teacher social networks and formal structures for teacher communication and collaboration - the international education community will be in a better position to leverage these assets to advance the diffusion and support of education innovations in LMICs.

The current study sought to test the stability of the new classroom observation tool that was developed by the initiative, and to reveal the extent of consistency among educational supervisors in their understanding of this tool. The study sample consisted of 80 male and female teachers who taught early grades in 10 schools in five education directorates in the three regions during the first semester of the 2019/2020 academic year.

Jordan community mobilization toolkit.

RAMP initiative – pupil questionnaire 1.

RAMP Initiative, midline survey: Principal and school questionnaire 1.