Ser Más Maestro

The program “Ser Más Maestro” aims to contribute to the improvement of the school environment through two main action lines. Firstly, there is the strengthening of the human capacities of teachers, that is, socio-emotional competences, pedagogical mediation and leadership and, secondly, strategies to promote scenarios that favour inclusion, in all its forms, within schools. “Ser Más Maestro” is taking and tailoring the school environment program to more than 4000 teachers from nearly 500 schools in 150 municipalities countrywide.

The program aims to contribute to the improvement of the school environment through two main action lines. Firstly, there is the strengthening of the human capacities of teachers, that is, socio-emotional competences, pedagogical mediation and leadership and, secondly, strategies to promote scenarios that favour inclusion, in all its forms, within schools.

The program started in 2009, although its new version has been implemented for three years. The scaling up of the project shows how a local cross-sectoral education project can become a national model in teaching training.

The methodology comprises three moments. Firstly, face-to-face training meetings are held where experts from each of the training topics go to schools and facilitate collaborative work, addressing concepts, didactics strategies and content favourable for teachers to develop in the classroom. There is a second moment called learning practices in which additional contents (seven textbooks and digital contents) are offered to teachers as a way to go deeper in the topics addressed in workshops. Finally, there is a third moment: the development of workshops with students in schools to familiarize teachers with the methodologies of working directly with students and for them to gain confidence. Those three moments are developed in more or less ten work visits by our professional teams to schools.

The program was founded in 2009 thanks to the will of the private sector to help improve education quality by accompanying schools. The idea was to share with schools the corporate knowledge on human talent management that the affiliated companies of Proantioquia had and how it could be enriching for schools’ human capital. They said: "Why don't we think about doing some level of transfer that works for schools?”. In this sense, Ser + Maestro began as a program of psychosocial support and performance management designed for teachers. In 2016, Proantioquia decided to review the approach, understanding teachers not as corporate workers of the educational sector but as powerful transformative leaders. Besides, this shift of perspective was aligned with the idea that any process of sustainable social transformation should involve school as the natural scenario that we have in Colombia for the construction of citizenship and also involve teachers as the actors who facilitate these processes. Thus, we redefined the program, its scope and its methodology. This version of the program has been implemented for over three years.

Taking and tailoring a school environment program to more than 4000 teachers from nearly 500 schools in 150 municipalities countrywide is an important achievement. Secondly, in all the schools where we have presence the index of school environment used by the program has improved significantly. The third important achievement is the consolidation of a methodological proposal and open-access training materials in relation with socio-emotional education, mediation, leadership, and didactics for inclusion. Additionally, another result is the significant acceptance of the program: evaluation conducted by teachers shows that they appreciate content, methodology and utility. Qualitative evaluation has also shown that some teaching practices has structurally changed towards inclusion of diversities, rotating leadership, new uses of school spaces, a better awareness of socio-emotional competences by the teachers and their peers.

The program is inspiring because it is the result of a cross-sectoral process and the contributions not only of academics, not only of the foundational sector but also of an exercise of validation and participation of the teachers themselves and of the communities. In addition, when we think about education quality, we generally think of programs that affect disciplinary knowledge, for example, language, mathematics or technological thinking; in contrast, Ser + Maestro is conceived as a school environment program that affects issues such as coexistence, reconciliation, integration, inclusion and we feel that this is a powerful and necessary variable for the educational system. Besides, the program is inspiring because it has contributed to creating several methodologies, materials, and ways of doing and reaching the territory that are legitimate and allow this program, among other things, to have as its central axis the most vulnerable communities in the country, those historically affected by the armed conflict, contexts where less training and less skills have been developed.

The first and structural is the school environment, understood not only as all the governance devices that exist to promote processes of coexistence and diversity, but as the level of ties and relationships that are lived in the classroom routine. The second concept is pedagogical mediation: teachers are conceived as mediators, that is, as subjects fully capable of staging resources, knowledge, ideas, but also learning experiences, not for students to learn the answers, but to ask their own questions. And the third concept is citizenship, not only as a legal concept, but a social category that allows us to account for processes of inclusion, participation and social interaction.

By using alternative languages from the world of theatre and mediation exercises, it does have an innovative way of approaching teachers and territories.

The main methodology used in the formative process is the workshop. This methodology encourages teachers to actively participate in the construction of knowledge and improvement of their practices.

Each formative cycle is made to measure including the voice of the communities involved via participatory mechanism, such as workshops, cross-sectoral meetings, surveys, focus groups...

Teachers enrich their practices towards inclusion and a better school environment and the professional team learn by first-hand about contextual realities and education phenomena.

Teacher groups are formed so they are diverse in age and years of experience.

The first is that it reaches territories where there has been a large impact of the conflict, on populations with high social vulnerability. Second, this has also allowed us to work in cross-ethnic contexts with the African descendant population, the indigenous population, and the displaced population and to link them directly from their conditions through a custom-made approach. Thirdly, the program aims to encourage teachers to implement didactical approaches for inclusion. When we talk about inclusion, we are talking about at least four dimensions: sexual diversity, interculturality, diversity of individual abilities, and diversity of geographical origins.

Considering the social and cultural diversity of the communities with which the program works, one of its ethical tenets is the collaborative work as a way of respecting the contexts and not transgressing any world views. For this reason, every formative cycle of Ser + Maestro is prepared with the community involved as well as with other relevant actors in the region.

The same team of trainers has different backgrounds and knowledge. There are people who come from education, scenic arts, the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences.

There are people who come from education, scenic arts, the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences.

The relationship has always been very horizontal, the actors relate in a peer-to-peer way. The program is not only understood as a teacher training program, but as a generator of inputs that can trigger public policy or other level programs in contexts.

The activities are not designed at Proantioquia in front of the desktop and then implemented in the territory, they are created along with teachers. Collaboration allows to work in a contextualized way.

Each formative cycle is made to measure including the voice of the communities involved. That makes this project democratic. At a management level, every partner has an incidence in the actions to be carried out.

They have had program advisers, especially on evaluation issues and, at some point, in restorative justice. There is also a person who permanently accompanies the project from a pedagogical perspective, which is Hilda Mar Rodríguez, a professor at the University of Antioquia.

The relationship has always been very horizontal, the actors relate in a peer-to-peer way. Proantioquia is well known for its expertise in articulating diverse actors in favour of education quality improvement and, thus, social transformation. This expertise also covers governance models in which mutual learning is encouraged.

External organizations may be part of the program as co-funding partners or as participants. They work with several companies affiliated and non-affiliated to Proantioquia. They also work with regional governments and their education departments as well as with corporate foundations that offer training and accompaniment routes for teachers. It is noteworthy that international cooperation, such as USAID, has contributed to scale up the program to a national level. On the other hand, in terms of allies, there are what they call academic allies who are experts from universities that accompany them in the validation of contents and in the construction of evaluation tools.

Learning goes in two ways. Institutions learn from communities and vice versa. Institutional learning could be even greater than what institutions propose to contexts because programs like this one work as powerful laboratories that collect information and learn first-hand about contextual realities that, in turn, allow methodology enrichment, decision making, and policy making.

The program ensures that the teams they design also implement, starting from the conviction that these are not two different processes, but part of the same continuum. Then the person, or the mediators, or the thematic leaders who begin to design the workshops also implement it territorially so that there is feedback between the educational design and the reality of the context.

Assessment includes cross-checking ethnographic observation made by pairs of mediators, semi-structured interviews to teachers and the measurement of school environment.

There are reports to the local governments and allies. In two months, a book gathering learnings from the program will be published.