Nuevos métodos pedagógicos entusiasman a maestros salvadoreños

Por David Shelby
Redactor del Servicio Noticioso desde Washington

San Salvador, El Salvador -- Maria Cristina Dubón says nobody can be a prophet in her own country, but her students and their parents might disagree.

Dubón is an English teacher at the primary school in La Palma, El Salvador, and she has managed to infect her students with a love of learning.  This is no small task, considering her classroom is full of students repeating a grade for the second or third time.

“I try to invest myself entirely in them because they deserve it,” Dubón told USINFO June 28.  Dubón works tirelessly collecting resources and developing lesson plans for her classes, but what really sets her apart from other teachers, according to her students, is that her classes are fun.

A visitor to Dubón’s class rarely will find the students seated in rows at their desks.  They are on their feet participating in interactive projects, playing vocabulary-building games and singing songs in English.

This might seem quite ordinary in some parts of the world, but in El Salvador, it is nothing short of revolutionary.  Meredith Hermance, a Peace Corps volunteer helping train Dubón and several of her colleagues in innovative teaching methods, explained that education in El Salvador is typically passive and teacher-focused.  The teacher lectures and writes on the blackboard, while the students simply copy information into their notebooks to memorize.

Hermance said she trains the teachers using the same interactive methods she wants them to use in their classrooms.  “By having them go through the experience, they see what the change is like for the students.  They say, ‘This is fun,’ and I say ‘Yeah, and your kids would enjoy this too,’” she said.

Dubón has embraced the new method.  “I’ve learned spontaneity,” she said.  “I must keep the students active, never passive.  I can play games with them.  If something isn’t working, I just take them out of the classroom.  I improvise.”

Dubón said she is fortunate to have a principal who is open to the innovative methods.  If the principal is close-minded, he will not permit such changes, she said.  But her principal gives her complete freedom.  “He says, ‘If it works, do it.’”

Hermance is not the only trainer helping Salvadoran teachers learn more interactive teaching styles.  The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in cooperation with the Salvadoran Ministry of Education, has developed a training program aimed at introducing these innovative teaching methods into hundreds of schools around the country.

Berta Cristina Portillo, the principal of a primary school in Tecoluca, is another school administrator open to new teaching methods, and she has been impressed with the change in students’ attitudes since her teachers participated in the USAID-sponsored training program. 

“The children are more enthusiastic.  They come to school thinking, ‘What does the teacher have planned for me today?’” she told USINFO June 29.  “Before, reading was something mechanical, something boring.  Now, they’ve started to analyze texts.  The kids now enjoy reading.”

She said her teachers have created vocabulary walls where students post new words as they learn them, and each student has a word box to store words he is trying to learn.  She said the students’ vocabulary has increased notably.

Portillo said this is the first time in her 22 years at the school that her teachers have changed their routines.  They have had training courses in the past, she said, but they never learned anything useful.

“This is different,” she said.  “It’s a practical methodology.  We can apply it.”

As one of the school’s teachers took her class into the courtyard to participate in an interactive vocabulary-building game, Portillo said, “The children are not just sitting there listening to the teacher.  They’re attentive.  They’re participating … It’s important for the child to be motivated.”

Hermance said she never imagined she would enjoy training teachers, but now she loves it.  She said she could have come to El Salvador and taught an English class for one group of students, or taught a group of teachers who will have an impact on hundreds more students after she is gone -- and she much prefers the latter.

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)