Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

I met Gerson Barreno (pictured) earlier this year, and he told me he used to struggle to teach reading to his first and second grade students. His classroom lacked books and he had almost no training in how to teach reading or keep his students’ attention.

Gerson Barreno teaching inside his corrugated metal classroom in Xecotoj, Guatemala.

Things began changing for Gerson when Child Aid delivered hundreds of children’s books to his school and started its Teacher Training program for Gerson and his fellow teachers. The program includes one-on-one, classroom-based instruction.

I thought about Gerson when I ran across this recent New Yorker article, by Atul Gawande, in which he describes a study that demonstrated the great importance of classroom-based coaching for teachers:

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

One-on-one, classroom-based coaching is precisely what Child Aid does for hundreds of teachers in neglected rural schools in Guatemala. Last year, we conducted more than 1,000 classroom-based training sessions for teachers who have little or no access to ongoing education that would help them teach reading better.