Hallelujah! The ball is rolling!

You know what they say, "time flies when you're having fun".  Also, in my case, time flies when you're in Chile on a Fulbright Award and have only 4 months to get settled, understand the history and current context of the education system, build relationships with schools and conduct an inquiry project!  I can not believe I've already passed my one month mark here.  After the delays with the spring break and getting adjusted to the Chilean timeline for replying to emails, this week and last are full of various school visits.  I'm pumped!  The focus on what exactly my inquiry will be has gotten a little blurry am I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not.  Luckily I am meeting with my advisor tomorrow in hopes to get ideas straightened out.

The other day I introduced myself to a hiking companion and after explaining the reason why I am in Chile, to identify best practices to bring back to the states, she remarked, "I think Chile is in the business of importing best practices not exporting".  This sums up how most introduction exchanges have gone here.  I think sometimes Chileans think something is wrong with my Spanish when I try explaining Fulbright and the purpose of my stay, since unfortunately many have negative impressions of the education system here.

I have an ever deepening sense of appreciation for immigrants who come to the USA.  In this case, those who had professional careers in their home country and then in the USA enter in the service industry or something like it.  At home, I was so grateful for congratulations, encouragement, and recognitions about my Fulbright Award.  Here, almost no one has heard of Fulbright and most think I am a student, not a seasoned teacher!

The purpose of the program, in my understanding, is NOT to see a type of pedagogy and copy it back home but to engage in inquiry based on observations.  Despite the difficulties I´ve had, I know that I have benefited in many ways here already (por ejemplo, I will never complain about 24 kids again).
I realize I haven´t written much about my project or my school discoveries in my blog.  There have been many changes from my naive initial ideas.  I have struggled with how to present all my learning and reflections, but here goes a little recap:

In my application, I proposed that I would get to know my assigned school (ideally an intercultural bilingual school), identify participants and conduct an action research study.  The study would aim to discover how classroom talk in groups and pairs aids in the transfer of academic language skills to less proficient students.  In order for this to happen, there needs to be schools with economically diverse populations and schools that engage in cooperative work.  Both barely exist in Chile.  It would be a challenge and last far more than four months to implement cooperative learning where neither teacher nor student are accustomed to the idea.

With an open mind, I strived to contact and arrange school visits within various school contexts.  Chile is going through a long overdue educational reform.  Since the dictatorship, there have been private, public and subsidized schools.  A main tenant of the reform is that subsidized schools can no longer be for profit and must accept anyone who applies.

Catholic School values

My assigned school from the Commission here is a subsidized school. I have also visited a public school with the help of contacts from Barbieri school psychologist who is a former Fulbright Scholar. I've trekked to three private schools, one that instructs in Hebrew, English and Spanish, and a British International School that uses the Primary Years Program.  I´ll also start to visit a less prestigious but super interesting private school that instructs in Spanish but follows the Assessment for Learning model from England which emphasizes independent learning and metacognition versus results driven instruction. There, I was invited to deliver a presentation about Accountable Talk, something we have been working on at Babieri.  This is the school closest aligned with my ideals and therefore the one I am most eager to spend time at.

My thoughts exactly!  It reads, "For a fair selection everyone should take the same test: please climb the tree".

As you can imagine, there are incredible differences between each setting.  The public school is in a neighborhood that I walk through very quickly to get to and from the subway.  Most families seem to live in one room homes.  There there is an actual bell that someone rings to indicate change of classes.  One of the private schools is located high above the city, on a campus more beautiful than most college and there was a line of luxury cars to pick up students at the end of the day.

37 First graders in uniform and ready for math class!

After learning that my original project would not work out, I drafted a few plan Bs.  One, to observe how scholarship students were apprenticed into private school settings.  This did not work out as most of the efforts for social integration have dissolved.  Two, to observe how the special education teachers integrate with classroom teachers.  Chile has a new program dedicated to this cause called PIE (programa de integración escolar).  The third idea, closer to my original idea was to visit intercultural schools, and study how the national curriculum is modified to support development of cultural identity and thus school success.

I want to stick to the foundations of the Fulbright Distinguished Teacher program which is to develop a project that is country dependent.  The latest idea that is brewing is to develop ideas about teaching for global competence based on the observations I make in various settings.  Global competence can be described as "ensuring students have the knowledge and skills to investigate the world, recognize prospectives, communicate ideas, and take action."   I have heard about IB curriculum at international schools, PYP is the primary years program version of that.  After observing it in action at the British school I immediately fell in love with the interdisciplinary, skill based curriculum.  That is my ideal teaching method.  I would like to be able to adapt those methods to fit in the curriculum requirements of my teaching context back home.  If only the clock weren't ticking so loudly in the background!

View from a school. It only took me a train ride, two bus rides, a taxi and 2.5 hours to get there!