By Victor Morales | Project Leader
Rodolfo Acuña was shaken up. He felt nervous, insecure. Rodolfo has been working at Carahue’s Liceo Claudio Arrau for five years, as a Wood Products technique specialty teacher. The school receives almost one thousand students, Carahue’s most emblematic school, a sort of mix in which children from the country meet and mingle with children of local municipal officials. It’s a public school, in a critical time for public education. It’s a technical school, in a country where technique education is more difficult than a scientific humanist school. It’s a school in a country whose learning rates have been stuck for decades. “There are so many barriers”, Acuña thinks. The school’s directing team knew these limitations and wanted to overcome them. In 2015 they started implementing an educational innovation to mobilize, to change: The Tutoring Networks.
Tutoring Networks is an innovative educational approach born in Mexico, replacing the traditional classroom paradigm, by allowing students to choose what they want to learn so they develop those subjects in a tutor relationship with their teacher. That basic freedom gives back the students the enthusiasm and excitement of learning. The tutor relationship, also encourages dialogue and horizontality. And public demonstration, the final step of the tutoring encourages abstract thinking, metacognition (being aware of how we learn) and communicational skills.
In October 2015, Rodolfo Acuña accepted the invitation for a tutoring and its approach with curiosity and some skepticism. That day, Educacion2020 along with the Mexican team of Tutoring Networks taught the tutorial to 28 educational professionals from six public schools from Araucanía. Rodolfo Acuña’s tutor was Gabriel Cámara, creator of the approach. That’s when he started feeling nervous.
—Something strange happened. I chose a tutoring on the Pythagorean theorem, that I thought I knew well. When I had to present the subject, I realized I knew very little. I got nervous, because you are used to be very confident when you speak.
That day was the starting point of the Tutoring Networks in Chile, a moment that Educación 2020 was looking forward for very long. Since 2014, Educación 2020 and the Luksic Foundation join seven public school from Araucanía, supporting their strengthening later. In the search for finding new ways of learning and teaching, injecting radical innovation to an educational system for the 21st century that holds on to 18th century logics; both foundations believed in the Tutoring Networks.
And it also made sense to schools. Rodolfo Acuña says he felt nervous, but the good kind. Because since that experience he started questioning his endeavor in the classroom. He realized that the teacher doesn’t have to know it all. That it’s OK to be a permanent learner. And started with small changes.
—This untidies the classroom. Now, I think more on the emotional side of my students. I’m achieving a closer conversation; I try to listen instead of me talking all the time.
Rodolfo Acuña wants to keep going, he wants his students to improve their tutoring skills so they become tutor to other students, and so on, the Tutoring Network unfolds. From Educación 2020, we hope it expands not just in this school, but to the whole country. That soon, this educational innovation will be public policy.
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