Proyecto Aprender

In the last 100 years, everything in the world has changed except for education, which is still based on memorizing superfluous contents and preparing students for industrial jobs.
The result? Students are bored, disengaged, and their academic achievement has been flat.

Proyecto Aprender is a b-learning program that provides a solution to this problem. How? By training teachers on a transformative pedagogy that enhances students curiosity through risk-taking and hands-on activities. In Proyecto Aprender teachers will experience the same that they will teach.

As stated by Fullan, the education system does not work and, one way or the other, will be transformed or will disappear over the next two decades. Therefore, we face a time bomb scenario in which education innovations will be increasingly necessary to adapt current schools into deep learning spaces.

During the last century, human and social conditions have changed dramatically: from transportation to communications, from health to work. But education remains the same: we continue teaching as in 1890. The world changed, the economy and society demand new skills (collaboration, innovation and critical thinking), but schools remain in the tradition of teaching as transmission, centered on the teacher and based on memorization of content that is quickly forgotten.

The problem is global since it affects most educational systems around the world. Yet, the solution needs to be adressed locally given that in every school there is a particular group of teachers that need to incorporate this new pedagogy taking advantage of their uniqueness.

Currently, there are more than 11,000 public schools in Chile, and only 40 of them have implemented some sort of deep learning (UCE). Nowadays, 58% of our students does not like to study and 40% does not understand what their teachers try to teach them. Furthermore, just 3% of them have a high performance in PISA. Countries around the world are facing similar problems (see for example: Mehta & Fine, 2019; Fullan et al., 2017).  

Proyecto Aprender is a technology-based, adaptable and scalable b-learning platform that address this problem by training teachers and school leaders to update and improve their pedagogical habits and techniques.

How? Through a transformative methodology focused on students, which enhances their curiosity through experimentation, risk taking, and creative production of community solutions, thereby developing the skills that today's society demands.

Proyecto Aprender is an innovative solution not only because it meets the expectations of the 21st century, but also because it does so taking into account the particular context of the students and their community. Local rootedness is key for Proyecto Aprender, since it exploits and builds on students' interests and passions. 

During the program, teachers will learn how to plan and develop collaborative projects. They will identify high impact contents and design specific activities to adress them through meaningful ways. By the end of the program (6 weeks long), teachers would have designed a complete project ready to be applied in their classrooms. 

Within the universe of 11,000 public schools in Chile, those categorized as "Insufficient" are particularly important for Proyecto Aprender. The school accountability agency ranks schools based on their perfomance, and those who achieve low during 4 years are closed.

The schools in danger of being closed are preciscely those who receive the most vulnerable population. These schools achieve low in outcomes such as standaridized tests, attendance, graduation, parents' expectations, socio-emotional indexes, among others. These are the reasons why they are the target that most urgently needs to train their teachers to re-engage their students.
Proyecto Aprender will prioritize this type of schools. In fact, the three schools that have already shown their availability to carry out the pilot have a Vulnerability Index greater than 93%, which expresses the interest of this type of schools in working with the program.

In addition to its very negative consequences, the pandemic forced many schools to open up to new ways of planning and working. Teachers have had to prioritize contents, to carry out uncommon activities to engage their students, and to seek new ways of learning beyond lective classes.

Many of these forced changes are at the same time the seeds of deep learning. Proyecto Aprender seeks to support school teams providing them with the required tools and methods so that they can adapt to this new reality and thus enable access to quality learning experiences for their students.

Teachers have demonstrated it is possible to change. We must take advantage of this momentum.

Actually we are in between the prototype and the pilot. We have just finished our prototype and we will test it for the first time in a school during August. After this first test, the plan is to improve the program to implement it in its final version again in 3 schools in November and December.

Teachers professional development is crucial to school improvement. To sucessfully implement educational innovations, it is necessary for the entire school teams to be trained, since the transformation is not merely administrative, but a cultural change.

However, professional development for teachers in schools often faces barriers such as adapting schedules, job burnout, and others. Proyecto Aprender is innovative because it is the first program aimed at training teachers in deep learning strategies that works through a blended learning platform (in Chile for sure, and in Latin America to the best of our knowledge). This allows for a rapid and flexible adaptation, as well as being easily scalable and prone to replication.

Our first program will be launched in August. At the end of this year we will have served 720 students. Next year the program will serve 1800 students (10 schools). In five years we hope to be placed in different countries and working within a global network serving more than 3600 students per country.

In the mid term, Proyecto Aprender will allow teachers to transform their pedagogies in order to guide their students to:

• problematize their communities to solve their needs
• identify themselves in their learnings
• develop new skills and knowledge
• prototype, experiment, fail and try again
• and publish in front of a real audience.

As a result, students increase their school engagement, raise their academic achievemnt, develop inter-and-intrapersonal competencies and go through successful educational trajectories. To measure commitment, a pre-post measurement will be performed using the Lara et.al. (2018) instrument, which assesses affective, cognitive and behavioral engagement. To measure the long-term impact, we will use socioemotional indexes and school performance variables such as retention, graduation, attendance, and access to higher education.

2 people: Valentina and José. We both are working full-time in Proyecto Aprender.

I (Valentina) am a teacher and journalist. My most significant achievement has been the creation of a college prep program in an extreme-poverty context, and its transformation into a nation wide program which currently benefits more than 450 students every year. As a teacher, I have worked in several slums in Santiago within low-income schools. In that role, I led a subject integration in all grades and introduced collaborative and interdisciplinary work in a community without these habits, accompanying teachers and monitoring the results. I experienced firsthand the need to train teachers in new instructional strategies, and as a school leader, I also learned the importance of flexibility and adaptability: for a teacher's training program to be effective, it must be adaptable to their needs and schedules.

José is a sociologist and has worked as a researcher, consultant and program designer. He has designed and implemented b-learning courses for teachers professional development, of which during 2020 more than 160 teachers and leaders have graduated. José's greatest contribution to Proyecto Aprender is the combination of his experiences: on the one hand, he brings his technical knowledge in technologies to build the b-learning platform, and on the other hand, he contributes with his practical knowledge to design content and programs to train teaching teams, addressing their specific needs.

Proyecto Aprender was born in an effort to solve a global problem by enhancing local identity: our challenge is to exploit the value of difference, prioritizing inclusion and building quality learning opportunities for all people, not regardless of their context, but rather taking advantage of its particularities to achieve greater engagement and involvement.

It becomes clear, then, that our leadership team must reflect and model the values that it intends to promote in school communities.

The founding team of Proyecto Aprender is made up of a woman and a man with different professional backgrounds, with very diverse work experiences and with dissimilar origins and life trajectories. In 2 years, we will grow our leadership team maintaining the inclusive focus that distinguishes us, opening selection processes that prioritize equity and diversity among their criteria; promoting that students and teachers from underserved populations that have been benefited from the program become tutors, forming a virtuous circle of learning, support, empathy, belonging, and inclusion.

We are applying to Solve because receiving this grant and support would be a tremendous step forward for us. Through this application we seek to overcome the challenges in our path to growth. Specifically, Solve would help us by:

• Providing guidance and advice from expert in issues such as our business model, strategic growth, timing for expansion, among others.
• Getting access to a powerful network so that we can expand our program abroad and get connected with cutting-edge innovators in the field.
• Gain exposure in the media and elaborate an outreach plan to this end.
• Providing economic finance.

We are in an incipient development stage in which we we have created a prototype but we require resources and support to transform it into a sales validated product. Our experience working with teaching teams for school improvement invites us to trust in the transformative potential of Proyecto Aprender, but we are aware that we need support to make this real.

The Solve program offers us the possibility of enhancing our project and at the same time connect with the global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors in education.

We are open to get connected with every other team, as well as with MIT faculty members and other organizations. For instance, the HP foundation have published great evidence regarding Project Based Learning impact, and the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation have financed some related initiatives. Therefore, both of them will be great partners.

We would also like to get connected with the Mcihael Fullan's Global Partnership "New Pedagogies for Deep Learning".

Our project is aimed at implementing Deep Learning in schools, and the method we use is Project Based Learning. Currently, however, our program is working in Latin America and not in the US. From the paragraph above we did not get 100% clear whether we are able or not to apply to this prize.