Help Revolutionize Education For Peruvian Children

Deysi , fellow of our Leadership Program, teaches at the San Miguel de Serén school located in Tambo Grande, Piura in the fourth grade of primary school. She, like all teachers throughout Peru, due to the pandemic caused by COVID 19, have had to reorganize to run their classes in the best possible way.

Deysi teaches his students virtually. If students have a learning gap, she teaches personalized classes by WhatsApp, or calls according to the availability of connection of her students, this method presents many more challenges than those already had in the education sector. 

One of her students is Karen, the teacher tells us:

“When I met Karen, she made some excuses to work. She justified herself with the fact that the signal and internet connection in her community is quite deficient, but as the days went by, we gained confidence and she started a lot of initiative "

At the beginning, Karen had difficulties reading and solving basic operations, which did not allow her to advance in the same way as her classmates or to participate in classes. It was clear that their starting point was different.

Therefore, in addition to the general classes with the entire classroom, Deysi and Karen had individual sessions to reinforce the topics covered in the classes.

In the personalized classes Karen asked more freely, she transmitted when something was not clear to her and her learning was more accurate, exceeding her own goals.

Nowadays Karen is at the level of the rest of her classmates, when she feels that she does not understand something, she transmits it without fear and on her own initiative, focusing on the subject until everything is clear.

Karen now carries out her activities with great conviction and complete security, she is very attentive to feedback because she has realized that it helps her a lot to improve.

The work of accompaniment and identification of the needs by the teachers of each of their students is very important for their good personal development.

During these times, the way of learning has changed and the students have looked for new ways to stay connected while they continue learning. Our PEP, Camila Vásquez tells us the story of her student Angelita from I.E. 101148 La Zanja (Cajamarca), who overcame her shyness to help Sonita, her classmate:

“This month we decided to work on our personal schedules, the challenge was for each one to do it thinking about their activities. Angela noted that Sonita had some confusion in doing so. Confidently, she stated what she had noticed and decided to do something to help her. She had a lot of ideas: record an audio, a video, or make a song, but she wasn't sure which one would work best. We took advantage of a mathematics topic that we had learned by watching our “Learn at Home” programs: solving situations of uncertainty by evaluating our probabilities.

Angelita made a chart with the 3 options and evaluated the 2 factors we learned: how much is her ability to make each option and how much would Sonia like it. She put a value, from 1 to 10, to each factor of her 3 options and then multiply them and find the one with the highest number, that is, the highest probability. So she decided to make a video, but was not sure how to do it. So, we analyzed together the videos from her previous classes and she found 4 essential parts: presentation, development, examples and conclusion.
At one point she said, "But I have never taught, I don't know how to do it" and she doubted she could do it. I tried to make her notice all the skills she had and she was surprised, we agreed to trust that she’ll do it with a lot of love.

She already had everything she needed, now she just had to wait for the recording. The next day she surprised us with this great job! She used a blackboard, it was recorded in her field, she used different colors to explain the difference between weekdays and weekends, she gave examples, she imagined what Sonita does at home, she asked her mom and dad for help, she used words like "see" to emphasize some ideas. She was a teacher! "