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This trip had two lines of work: on the one hand, to continue with the training that ARPA is carrying out with the Ministry of Public Education (MEP) and, on the other hand, to seek a deepening and continuation of the project in Costa Rica.
During the week of November 27 to December 1, the fourth mission of the collaboration project between the University of Chile and the Agency for Cooperation and Development (AGCID), a project carried out by the ARPA Initiative, took place. On this occasion, five Language and Mathematics instructors traveled with the director of ARPA and researcher associated with the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) of the University of Chile, Patricio Felmer, who is leading the search for continuity for this project.
This trip had two lines of work, on the one hand, to continue with the training that ARPA is carrying out with the Ministry of Public Education (MEP) of Costa Rica for people who work in the ministry and teachers in schools. The other line of work was to hold meetings with organizations and universities to seek a deepening and continuation of the project beyond what has been stipulated so far.
From the point of view of this formative work being carried out by ARPA in Costa Rica in the areas of Spanish and Mathematics, national and regional advisors and practicing teachers attended the workshops in the city of San José.
In Costa Rica, the territory is divided into 27 regions, equivalent to what would be a Local Education Service in Chile. Each of these 27 regions has an advisor. The regional advisors are agents of the MEP who carry, from the ministry to the schools, the ministry’s work guidelines in the areas. Since the second Chilean mission to Costa Rica, Mathematics and Spanish advisors have been participating in workshops, which involve 6-hour working sessions in each mission.
“In these instances, the basic ARPA concepts of problem solving and collaborative work and how to bring this to the classroom have been introduced. The training workshops, so far, are being successfully received and are expected to be concluded by mid-2024”, said Patricio Felmer, regarding the progress of the project.
On the other hand, they continued the work that had been carried out with schools and with practicing teachers. This work has two elements: the training of monitors, who are Costa Rican teachers, and the accompaniment of monitors working with teachers in schools. In the case of Spanish, a teacher who works for the MEP is participating and has already conducted four sessions with each teacher at the Rincón Grande School in Pavas. There are 25 teachers of first and second cycle, who are participating in this Spanish workshop, with reading and writing problems, where the MEP monitor is leading the sessions.
In mathematics, there are high school teachers, divided into two workshops of 15 teachers each, corresponding to four high schools in San José. The monitors are the department heads of these four high schools. ARPA has been accompanying them in training the thirty teachers to carry out Problem Solving in their schools.
These are the advances made in this fourth mission with respect to the two areas that initiated this collaboration. Regarding the meetings and visits, they paid special attention to the meetings to look for a continuation of this project. Below you can find a brief chronology of the mission.
Monday
The first activity was a meeting with the Ministry of Public Education (MEP) of Costa Rica, coordinated by Alfredo Ortega Cordero, head of the Department of Third Cycle and Diversified Education of the MEP, and with the participation of national advisors. The purpose of the meeting was to present the progress made in the products agreed upon for the project:
(a) An explanatory brochure on the fundamental elements of the ARPA strategy in Costa Rica.
b) Video capsules.
c) Problem book. The three materials were presented in both the Spanish and language areas.
This instance also served as a reunion between the ARPA team and MEP, and to discuss the progress of the project. At noon, part of the ARPA team visited the “República de Chile” school, part of the Escuelas Chile network, located in the San José Regional Office. There they were received by the school principal, Jorge Morera, who -after a welcome- directed them to the place where they carried out two parallel RP Action workshops, one for teachers and the other for fourth grade students, in which case they solved problems in Spanish and Mathematics.
During this day, a meeting was also held with MEP authorities to analyze the projections for 2024, including universities in this project and a component in schools.
Tuesday
This day they met with the Regional Advisors of Costa Rica to carry out a new training day of the ARPA Strategy, both in Spanish and Mathematics. The meeting took place at the Regional Office in San José, where the monitors Constanza Alvarado, Paula Olavarría and Pamela Sepúlveda led the Spanish workshop, while the monitors Carmen Gloria Espinoza and Natalia Ruiz led the mathematics workshop. The purpose of these workshops is that the pedagogical leaders of Costa Rica can learn in depth about the ARPA strategy and then share it with their regions. The “ARPA monitors in Costa Rica”, who are in charge of leading the pilot workshop sessions in schools, also participated in this training session.
Subsequently, a meeting was held between the ARPA team and CONARE (National Council of Rectors) to discuss a possible pilot project with the five public universities of Costa Rica, in order to open new paths for the ARPA Costa Rica project to move forward. In the universities, the main idea would be the incorporation of teacher trainers to this pedagogical strategy offered by ARPA. This meeting was chaired by Catalina Perera, head of CONARE’s academic directorate, and was attended by four of the deans of the five universities that train teachers.
“For the deans there is a need for a methodological approach of teachers in Costa Rica, which approaches active learning methodologies, that is, collaborative work, a component of skills development and this thought mainly in future teachers and future teachers have an experience in their training that is related to this way of carrying out the teaching process in schools and that otherwise, This strategy has not effectively reached the classrooms and has remained in the written curriculum and not the implemented one”, said the director of ARPA.
“The idea of working with some regional directorates, with one or two, and carrying out a pilot with 5 or 7 schools, to systematically incorporate this strategy along the same lines of what is being done in the project with the Municipality of Santiago de Chile, with 5 schools and in four disciplinary areas”, he added.
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Wednesday
They had a meeting with the regional director of Alajuela, Francisco Corella, and his advisory team, where they discussed the possibility of carrying out a pilot project between 5 and 10 schools participating in this project in the four basic subjects of the curriculum.
“They expressed great interest, with the prevention that it would not be a short project, but something long term, drawing deadlines between 2025 and 2027 (…) In addition, the regional director pointed out the importance of measuring the progress of this project and the impact of the change of practices on teachers and students, which coincides with ARPA’s proposal”, emphasized Patricio Felmer.
On the other hand, as we mentioned before, within the ARPA-Costa Rica project, one of the agreements has been to carry out a pilot with schools where one of the ARPA monitors in Costa Rica conducts ARPA training sessions with school teachers, who then implement the strategy in their classrooms.
These workshop sessions entail a process of accompaniment for teachers in order to strengthen their pedagogical practices. In this way, on the one hand, it is possible to adapt the strategy to the Costa Rican context and, on the other hand, to learn how the strategy works in order to subsequently evaluate its implementation in other schools in the country.
In the case of Spanish, the pilot project is being carried out in the district of Pavas, whose monitor is the outstanding teacher Brenda Rojas, who works in the workshop with teachers of the second cycle of primary school. In the area of mathematics, a pilot program is being carried out in Alajuela and another in Escazú. The first is carried out by the monitors Arturo Gomez (teacher), Carolina Morales (Alajuela Regional Advisor) and Elenilzon Arroyo. The second is conducted by teachers Adrian Umana, Nancy Castro and Rene Quiros. All pilot workshops are planned in conjunction with the ARPA team.
Thursday
The day was marked by a meeting with pedagogy students from the National University of Costa Rica. They solved Spanish and Language problems and reflected on the potential of problem solving as a learning strategy, while teacher trainers and academics from the university carried out the same activity.
Afterwards, a meeting was held with academics from the university, at which time the director of the initiative, Patricio Felmer, presented the work of the ARPA initiative both in Chile and in Costa Rica. After this meeting, a second meeting was held with the aforementioned participants and the authorities of CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia en Educación) to discuss possible alliances.
The activities ended with a visit by the team to the Chilean embassy in Costa Rica, where they were received by Ambassador Margarita Portuguez, whom they had already met on a previous mission to the Gabriela Mistral school in Alajuela. In this fourth mission, this meeting was arranged, where the team shared the motivations to continue this work in Costa Rica and she expressed her intention to support it from the embassy.
By Javiera Márquez, ARPA journalist.
Posted on Dec 4, 2023 in News
