NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Well Proven Best Practice Is Not Used In Latin America To Cope With Poor Performance
By Ernesto Schiefelbein, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago
KeywordsLatin America, Primary education, Best practice
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Even though Latin America provides universal access to primary education, eventually only half of each age group is able to understand the main message from a simple 100 word text. Fortunately, there are a few programmes that provide good quality education in spite of being implemented in rural isolated areas. However, this best practice is not being replicated in the rest of society.
The rhetoric of universal access hides the tracking of Latin American students from the richer half of the society into private schools or good suburban public schools, while the poorer half enrolls into public urban marginal or rural schools. In both tracks teachers use a ?whole class? (frontal teaching) approach. This approach is efficient for students that received fairly early stimulation at home. For example, teachers can help 7-year old students from families in the wealthiest socioeconomic quintile --who are able to use more than 3000 words and have the ability to make reasonable inferences and abstractions -- to be reading by the end of grade one. On the other hand, only 10 to 20% of students from the ?lower half of the income distribution? may be reading by the end of grade one. This low learning achievement in the poorest quintile is probably linked to temporary drop out, lack of relevance of what is learned, lack of preschool, lack of textbooks, lack of family support, poor vocabulary used at home (some 500 words), and the fact of being taught by young teachers with little experience.
However, there are a few programmes - Escuela Nueva (Kline, 2002) (in Colombia), Instructores Comunitarios (Ezpeleta, 1997) (in Mexico), Regularizacao do Fluxo Escolar (Leitao, 2005) (in Brazil), and Junior Achievement [1] (in two dozen L.A. countries)-- that have been able to provide good quality education to students from families in the lower half of the economic distribution. In fact the Regional UNESCO Education Office reported in 2000 that the average score of rural Escuela Nueva Colombian schools was higher than the average in urban schools. Evaluations carried out by The World Bank (Psacharopoulos, Rojas and Vélez, 1992) and other researchers (McEwan, 1998) have also reported good results for the Escuela Nueva schools.
The best practice provided by these successful programmes involves ten key common components: (i) Interactive scripts (guides) with precise instructions for students to generate (and experience) interesting learning processes; (ii) students work in small groups (four students) for some parts of the activities asked for (demanded ) in the interactive scripts; (iii) students follow instructions to interview people, work with relatives, develop projects, and write results that are shared in the groups; (iv) informal coaching is provided in each group by the best students (in a course with 28 students working in seven groups, one of the best 7 students is assigned to each group); (v) Each group of students advances at their own pace and the teacher monitors the advance and makes decisions about further work before moving into the next unit; (vi) a student government is elected and takes responsibility for recreation, garden, library, discipline, and other activities; (vii) a school willing to join the programme must organize their teachers to visit a demonstration school; (viii) each teacher spends one week in a training course using interactive scripts (as students would do) to simulate its usage in a class; (ix) the best teacher for teaching to read and write is assigned to grade one that requires more experience and professional skills (as suggested by a group of experts in a cost-effectiveness study), and (x) teacher learning is then supposed to continue in micro-centres (attended by teachers from a few nearby schools), where teachers meet once a month to exchange experiences, help each other solve teaching problems, agree to carry out small experiments, and report the results in the next meeting. Four videos are available to document these components [2].
Interactive scripts are the results of selecting the best approaches of all teachers willing to try their own approach and evaluating the learning achieved by representative groups of students (similar to the approach implemented in Sesame Street) [3]. Developers of the materials avoid the use of local examples (or foreign drawings), by asking students to ?look at a bush or a tree through the window and bring a couple of leaves for each of the groups to work with?. Special attention is paid to the instructions for students to carry out the activities [4]. Instructions help students to learn ?how they learn? (meta-cognition) and they are able to explain to visitors (or even new teachers) how they are learning. Furthermore, the best student in each group helps each member to understand the instructions and (in such monitoring process) students learn to fully understand what they read (and the monitor develops social competences as a local leader).
Unfortunately, other Latin American countries are not taking advantage of these proven best practices. Many countries are distributing free textbooks to students, but the textbooks are not tried out and validated with a sample of pupils before the massive distribution to all schools (therefore, half of the pages are of poor quality and the material is seldom used). Also, teacher training institutions keep training new teachers as they were trained 30 or 40 years ago and are not trying out (and evaluating) the approaches described above. This is a pity because even a single strategy (assigning to grade one the best teacher for teaching to read and write) would probably reduce by half the percentage of students that never learn to understand what they read (in spite of spending six or more years at primary school). Several other strategies identified as cost-effectiveness by the group of experts could also be considered (Schiefelbein, Wolff and Schiefelbein, 1998).
Notes
[1] Activities in each LAC country are reported in
www.ja.org
[2] www.volvamos.org
[3] www.ascilite.org.au
[4] unesdoc.unesco.org
References
Ezpeleta, J. (1997) Algunos desafíos para la gestión de las escuelas multigrado, Revista Iberoamericana de Educación, Nº 15. Available at
www.rieoei.org
Kline, R. (2002) A Model for Improving Rural Schools, Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol.2(2), Available at
www.tc.columbia.edu
Leitao, L. (2005) Regularizacao do Fluxo Escolar.
McEwan, P. (1998) The Effectiveness of Multigrade schools in Colombia, Int. J. of Educational Development, Vol 18 (6).
Psacharopoulos, G., Rojas, C. and Vélez, E. (1992) Achievement evaluation of Colombia?s Escuela Nueva, World Bank, WPS896, April 1992, Washington DC.
www.volvamos.org/english
Schiefelbein, E., Wolff, L. and Schiefelbein, P. (1998) ?Cost-Effectiveness of Education Policies in Latin America: A survey of Expert Opinion?, Inter-American Development Bank, N° Educ-109, Washington, DC., December, págs 13-16. Available at
worldbank.org/education
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