The first months of 2022 have been bustling with a variety of activities for the new year. 60,000 manuals are being printed and logistics set in place for these manuals to be distributed to the different locations. The Ministry of Education appointed seven new departments for the consortium to work on, with 30,000 teachers in phase one.

The seven new departments are much more rural departments which will provide the team with the necessary challenges, but will also be a great learning experience to provide rural teachers with the needed and necessary tools to support high quality education for children. And the Ministry is finalizing also the accountability of checking all the diplomas for the first batch of 30,000 teachers to continue into phase two.

Digitalization of our program
The team is furthermore working on digitalization of our program. This year we hope to generate more of a community of learning, encouraging sharing and learning between teachers, so a social community manager will be hired to generate interaction and content sharing within Facebook groups, and most probably also Pinterest which provides the consortium with a lot more tools to track and follow sharing and actual learning content.

This year added value video content will also be developed to go along with several of the modules of phase 2 of the manual. With our consortium partner AMG Guatemala a pilot is being implemented with a mobile phone app, which will push nudges and content to a group of teachers and track their learning as well.

Developing phase three and four of the program
As the consortium works on these tools for phase two we are also busy looking ahead at phase three and four of the program which is also being developed. Several weeks have been taken to reflect on and (re-)build a results framework for the program, based on the initial question: what is the profile of the teacher we want to see after four years of the program.

Year one and two focus heavily on the teacher and their dignity and vision on learning, on self-reflection and on receiving feedback from peers. In year three and four we build forth on that, but also bring much more to the foreground the learning we want to see in students and the learning communities, through concepts such as 21st century learning and social-emotional value-based learning for children.

Energy to make a difference
By making these concepts more explicit and mainstream for teachers, we continue to challenge their growth for sake of Guatemalan children. Naturally in this process we will also take into account the learning challenges of the pandemic and more than two years of closed schools in the region. Many interesting challenges for the consortium as you can read, but even more energy to make a difference together!