The Escuela Nueva model was designed to address the devastating shortcoming of schooling in Colombia during the 1970s especially in rural areas, and since that moment we have worked to improve the quality, relevance and efficiency of education. Fundación Escuela Nueva is a Colombian NGO founded in 1987 by the authors of the Escuela Nueva pedagogical model and the core team that pioneered and developed the program. Since our founding, we have contributed to improve the lives of children and their families through education that empowers and enables them as individuals.

 

We are pioneers innovating and adapting the Escuela Nueva model to new contexts, such as Escuela Activa Urbana® for urban populations and Escuela Nueva Learning Circles® for out of school children in emergency situations. We also lead the implementation and adaptation of these programs internationally in various countries.

 

To understand how we respond to the needs of children in rural areas, particularly in incomplete multi-grade schools, it is important to outline the context, not just in Colombia, but in Latin America in general, in terms of coverage and quality of basic education.

 

The Latin America and the Caribbean region have made significant gains in access and enrollment but quality continues to be a great blight. The region shows high rates of enrollment, but at the same time it is one of the regions with high dropout rates. Despite the advance in access, inefficient and poor quality basic education persists, which leads to high levels of failure and incomplete basic education.

 

This critical state of affairs is analogous for the high failure rates in low-income schools. The low teaching quality and the ineffective teacher training (particularly with respect for addressing the needs of the multi-grade school); the children`s early entry into the working world and the lack of appropriate textbooks and material coherent with active and participative methodologies, are analogous for the high failure rates in low-income schools. In addition to this, in rural areas many children take part in crop gathering during the harvest season and migrate from one area to another, caught in a cycle of failure. Schools do not sync with the lives of these students, who need flexible strategies to suit the reality of farmer-peasant children.

 

In Colombia, authors and initiators of the Escuela Nueva innovation set out to address all the nested factors of education outlined above simultaneously, rather than ineffectively tackling each in isolation. The comprehensive approach to education planning and policy has guided FEN, and through it expansion.

 

The Escuela Nueva Activa® model transforms the conventional teacher centered learning and promotes a child-centered, participatory learning approach with a flexible promotion mechanism that allows students to advance from one grade to another and complete academic units at their own pace. It also instills democratic behaviors in students through instruments like the Student Government elected by the students and organized in working committees, processes as problem solving by teams demanding respect for others´ opinions and cooperative learning in small groups. In turn, teachers interact with students by spending more time giving individual and group feedback, advising and guiding on tasks and identifying the learning pace of each student to better support them. Finally, the learning guides have a methodological structure with a sequence of steps to guide the students to resolve questions and problems individually, in pairs and in small groups. This is a new concept of “interactive and dialogue-based” learning materials promoting collective construction of knowledge, a prominent feature of the innovation.

 

About the teacher formation, the Escuela Nueva Activa® in-service Teacher Training Strategy was conceived and organized to ensure correct implementation of the model and promote long term sustainability. The main principles that oriented the Escuela Nueva training strategy were experiential and practice-based training with a strong component of attitudinal change. Teachers are trained with similar methodologies as those they will apply with their students through practical, experiential workshops. They exchange, support each other, and promote positive attitudinal change through teacher’s learning circles, called microcenters. Partly as a result of teacher training reforms, Escuela Nueva began to show a positive impact on student learning and social skills. Different evaluations carried out by national and international agencies and academic groups since 1980 demonstrate that Escuela Nueva improves significantly the academic achievement of rural and urban primary schooling as well as self-esteem, social skills, civic and democratic behavior of children.

 

The most promising educational change innovations are those that have demonstrated not only positive empirical results, but that are also replicable and scalable. From the outset Escuela Nueva set to develop innovations that are replicable, decentralized, and viable technically, politically, and financially.

 

However aware that innovation and programs fade within bureaucracies and are very susceptible to political and administrative changes , the authors and initiators of the Escuela Nueva model founded Fundación Escuela Nueva, an organization from civil society to maintain the quality of the program, innovate it and adapt it to new contexts and settings. That is how in 2001, with USAID`s support, FEN designed and piloted the Escuela Nueva Learning Circles, a program for migrant and displaced populations, an innovation that also has become a national policy. In the urban adaptation Fundación Escuela Nueva implemented the model in 20 low-income schools of Bogotá, identified as those with the poorest academic performance through a local standardized test. After two years of the intervention, an evaluation led by the National University of Colombia confirmed significant improvement in language and math skills. These schools, with lowest ranking in the city among 2,500 centers evaluated, performed better than the city´s average.

 

FEN has not only revitalized education innovation in Colombia, but its latest challenge is to be engaged with shifting educational paradigm on a global scale. This began in 2003 by organizing and delivering two international congresses involving over 2500 participants from 18 counties. The success of the event indicated an interest in creating an international network of stakeholders in education, thus spurring FEN’s most resent project: leading a global movement to improve the lives of children through our educational model.

 

ReNueva, a virtual campus and tool to create new knowledge, circulate best practices, and facilitate horizontal relationships among a wide range of Escuela Nueva allies. As FEN continues to develop support to quality education, it stays true to its fundamental belief that change must involve meaningful involvement of key stakeholders, namely, students, teacher, and parents.

 

All these elements and components of our model allow us to prepare children for the 21st century skills. We are convinced that this is the current need and future of education and the only way to improve the lives of children and families. In FEN we have worked for 28 years, every day, to improve the quality, relevance and efficiently of education by rethinking the way we learn.