UDP Internacional

19 May 2023

The Faculty of Education of the Diego Portales University has been working together for around three years with different institutions in Brazil, such as the Secretary of Education of the State of Pernambuco, the Salesian Network, Unibanco and the Bahema Foundation. “This is a Faculty project that aims to develop collaboration opportunities with different international institutions. (…) These projects carried out for Brazil have had the management of the dean’s office and the Faculty’s Teacher Professional Development Center”, commented Ruth Arce, director of Pedagogy in Secondary Education UDP.

“The participants are Brazilian professionals from educational management teams who have participated in the Technical Pedagogical Tools and Mentoring course (Unibanco) or only in the latter (Bahema), the learning from the courses is transmitted to the teams of school management and, therefore, the teaching teams; all the projects are scalable up to the classroom teachers”, explained Arce.

The benefits that these projects bring are mutual, adds the director, “we show the quality of our pedagogical knowledge for the region, our academic teams diversify the training proposals, we know other educational realities; while for the Brazilian counterpart this has great significance as it finds in the region a high level of development in issues of educational management, mentoring, among others. An interesting space has been opened to broaden educational experiences, recognizing common challenges”.

Director Ruth Arce detailed these collaborations in particular:

Pernambuco State

Since 2020, he has worked with the Pernambuco Secretary of Education, training 60 people belonging to the municipal management teams in technical-pedagogical tools for school management, addressing everything from pedagogical reflection to classroom management, and culminated this training with a seminar in the city of Recife in November 2022, attended by 400 people.

How did this collaboration between the Faculty and the State of Pernambuco come about?

The collaboration starts as a necessity of the State of Pernambuco, who summoned the Faculty of Education UDP to create a professional development program in the teaching management teams of the State departments. We started working in 2019 with the formulation of the project to start face-to-face classes the following year in Recife. However, the pandemic delayed the process and the modality, finally developing it in a virtual format through 5 class periods between 2020 and 2021. This implementation then reached the schools through the course attendees and this was closed. experience with a Seminar in the city of Recife in November 2022.

What did the seminar held in Recife consist of? What was talked about?

Three moments were developed in the seminar: our presentation on ‘The role of the pedagogical coordinator in the school context’, a panel about the experiences of schools in their management challenges, and a poster exhibition about innovative experiences in the classroom with a focus on the changes generated by the ‘pedagogical coordinators’ in their schools based on the knowledge provided by the state management teams.

Unibanco

In the case of Unibanco, Educación UDP began working in 2022 to train 90 mentors who will work with more than a thousand school pedagogical coordinators in an educational quality improvement plan.

How did this collaboration between the Faculty and Unibanco come about?

Almost in the same way as before, the needs of the institution to promote improvement processes in the school and the request to deliver pedagogical management tools to their teaching support teams at schools. After this first course, the need arose to train the same teams in ‘pedagogical mentoring’. To date we have trained 90 mentors, each of them has an average of 12 to 14 mentees and each of these has an average of 25 teachers per school, that is, they will work with approximately 1,200 school pedagogical coordinators.

What does this mentor training consist of?

It is a 36-hour course on mentoring as a strategy for improvement in which theoretical and practical knowledge is combined, mainly mentoring simulations.

bahema foundation

Lastly, the Faculty has been working since 2022 with Bahema, a foundation that brings together paid private schools from different states of Brazil. These teams are in a pedagogical mentoring course and will carry out an internship in Chile in June 2023 to see local educational models.