The work we’ve been doing with teachers is multifold. First, I think it’s important to lay on the table the assumptions with which the school was created: accepting as true that the teachers’ selection tests allow the school to hire the best teachers, considering them as different from the teachers that walk the grounds of all other schools in the province of Buenos Aires. This first hypothesis is false.
We realized that this is not the case, that the teachers working in our school are the same teachers that populate the classrooms of all other schools in the province of Buenos Aires. So this means we have to work with them on matters that, I believe, are pending in many schools, and we have the opportunity to address these: they have to do with the training these teachers have had regarding teaching. Although it’s true that for the first two or three years, the focus of our school, so to speak, was the student’s learning process, because we took it for granted that our teachers had the teaching aspect resolved, we realized over the years that in fact our starting point was a wrong hypothesis, so we had to change direction, and we at the Academic Matters Office had to address the question of teaching.
And we believe the matter of teaching is precisely the point at issue in several schools, in many schools, at least in the province of Buenos Aires, and that something should be done in this regard. Which is why we found it extremely interesting and powerful to have the chance to be by their side, shoulder to shoulder with each teacher, thinking about the question of teaching. So we started to work—and I speak in the plural because I’m including the school’s pedagogical counselor, who made it possible for us to plan, design and organize the work to be done with each group of teachers.
We have been working with the social sciences teachers, the natural sciences teachers, the math teachers, the communication studies teachers, etc., all of them separately. And all of this allows us to map the daily progress made by each group of teachers. Likewise, we expect the teachers to do this work with students. At the Academic Matters Office we are planning, carrying out and evaluating the work related to teaching, individually with the school teachers and based on the progress—of course it’s a non-linear progress because of the difficulties they might experience, so we adapt the work in order to move forward.