Teacher Training

Providing teacher training to improve rural schooling in mexico

DescriptionAlt text

This program intends to improve the literacy skills of children in 100 multi-grade schools, where a single teacher typically handles students from multiple grades and ages, by improving educational instruction.

Project team

Manuel Felix - Investing in Education
Vicky Colbert - Fundación Escuela Nueva
Antonio Saldívar - Innovación Educativa

Project contact: Manuel Felix
(email project contact)

Activities

There are three key elements to the Escuela Nueva Mexicana program:

  • Teachers receive hands-on, practical workshops from Escuela Nueva specialists, supported by teacher manuals.
  • Students receive learning guides that promote self-paced, self-directed learning, group and individual work.
  • Microcenters. Provide teachers with peer support and experience sharing in “learning circles”. This component aims to promote innovation & knowledge building.

Evaluation

The evaluation will try to answer the following question: How do instructional practices in classrooms of multi-grade schools affect literacy gaps? Our organization is collaborating with the University of Chicago to design a rigorous impact evaluation and test if an improvement in educational instruction leads to an improvement in literacy rates.

Population served

The Escuela Nueva Mexicana Program serves communities with schools where a single teacher typically handles students from multiple grades. The selection process aims to identify those communities at the greatest disadvantage. The methodology to select the 100 primary schools in September 2009 will consider a combination of poverty and academic performance indicators. The academic performance criteria will specifically consider failure, repetition and drop-out rates to identify the communities with greatest need.