Ramacrisna Institute

Mission: Transform lives through innovative solutions in education and professionalization, aimed at human, cultural, social and environmental development.

Vision: To be a reference in the Third Sector in governance, self-sustainability, innovation and generation of positive social and environmental impact.

Values: Ethics - Altruism - Innovation - Commitment - Determination - Transparency - Flexibility

Our team lead is an institutional employer, responsible for the preparation and monitoring of projects and actions at the Institute. She is also responsible for implementing the monitoring of the actions as well as the improvement processes arising from the evaluations carried out. Among the team members, she is also responsible for the English language contacts and actions.

As a senior employee, she joins the Ramacrisna team with the objective of facilitating the institute, international contacts and achievements, thus extending the reach and the learnings that can be obtained by the institution.

The team leader, Julia Torres, has a strong background in children and youth development projects and has managed multiple concurrent projects. She is also the only one of the team members with English language skills and will therefore be interpreting for the other participants.

The two other staff members who will be part of the LEAP project sprint are in direct contact with the workshops and project participants respectively. The project holds weekly meetings to monitor the work and part of this workload can be allocated to the LEAP project meetings. The team members also bring other experiences and institutional knowledge that can add to the study, helping to understand its viability and relevance.

They are responsible for developing learning solutions at CAER, always aiming to accelerate and generate impact, especially in improving the subjects of Portuguese and mathematics.

In view of the time the Instituto Ramacrisna has been operating, the team members will add their knowledge of the local reality to the project and bring their perception of the scope and efficiency of the CAER project to guide the preparation of the evidence bases.

Our solution offers complementary schooling and non-formal education to children in the opposite school hours, supporting diverse cultural competencies development.

The Centro de Apoio Educacional Ramacrisna (CAER) is a social project that has been operating since 1992 and aims to offer children from the local community complementary activities and school reinforcement, seeking to bridge the educational gap and broaden their cultural skills. The project also acts as family support, helping families in which those responsible need to leave their children at home after school, so that they can rely on CAER as a place to integrate the school process. Currently the following workshops are offered: reading and leisure in the library, digital literacy table, digital whiteboard, educational computing, robotics, sports activities, chess and dance.

CAER offers educational support activities in a variety of ways, presenting participants with high-tech equipment and providing playful activities that work on fine and gross motor skills, emotional health, self-esteem and autonomy. The higher objective is to act in a complementary way to the school performance, adding efforts to potentiate the students' learning.

As years go by and society changes it has become necessary to update CAER’s workshops offer in order to keep up with the children's world changes, especially regarding the entry of computerized technology in people's lives. Thinking about this and taking into account the availability of equipment and knowledge of the Ramacrisna FabLab project (Fabrication Laboratory) - which is a space for creativity, learning and innovation accessible through collaborative processes of creation, sharing of knowledge, and the use of digital fabrication tools - training workshops were instituted with CAER to bring to the participating children a new range of activities and knowledge. With the pandemic, there was a major gap in two school years in the lives of the children causing considerable learning loss and further increasing the educational challenge. Located in a rural area, and serving a low-income public, CAER continues to seek to contribute to reduce the educational gap in the region of the Santo Afonso neighbourhood in the municipality of Betim, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The methodology developed in the Ramacrisna Educational Support Centre (CAER) is based on  projects pedagogy, which is a form of curriculum organization in which students are encouraged to explore the reality, through the relationships between the areas of knowledge. The projects are developed through students and / or institutional interests and demands and the themes are studied through workshops addressing current issues, as well as concerns and issues introduced by students always aligned to the institutional projects, proposed by the coordination of the Centro de Apoio Educacional Ramacrisna.

The students' interests are identified from a diagnosis of the class, made through informal conversations and oral and written activities, to verify the experience that the students have in the workshops, as well as their daily experiences. Class interests and suggestions for projects to be developed in the workshops are also collected.

The work dynamics are defined based on the answers to the questions "What do you want to do?" "Why?" "How?"

To define the methodology to be worked on in CAER workshops, contents are worked on:

Conceptual - are approached in view of current events and information.

Procedural - the functioning of the computer, active learning on the literacy table, digital whiteboard and virtual and augmented reality glasses, good performance in reading and sports activities.

Attitudinal - worked during circle times, games and through the construction of rules.

When it concerns the workshop environment, we try to create constant opportunities for the exchange of experiences between students x students and students x teachers, for the action, the reflection, the interactivity and mainly the pleasure and meaning of the student facing the knowledge acquisition process, trying to offer activities that can contemplate the visual, auditory and synesthetic intelligences as well as the different ways of children's learning.

The activities take place in the mornings and afternoons, during the school counter-shift. There are 4 workshops in the morning and 4 in the afternoon, with 50 minutes duration each one. In the workshops, the activities start with a call, followed by a presentation of the day's activities (according to the project in execution) and then the execution. After the verification of the student's activity by the teacher, there follows an oral evaluation of the activity and organization of the space for the next class.

The workshops currently offered are: Digital Literacy Table, Collective sports activities, Judo, Chess, Dance, Capoeira, Reading and interaction using the Library, digital whiteboard, Educational Computing besides activities in partnership with FabLab Ramacrisna using virtual reality tools, educational robotics among others.

Despite being carried out for over 20 years, CAER's actions have not been parameterised and there is still not a structured and continuous evaluation mechanism on the actions to prove their effectiveness.

In 2022, an initial diagnosis was made with the participants and through it it was found that children aged 6 to 11 were not literate. The others who could read and write did not know the different textual genres and had spelling mistakes that were incoherent with their age and/or school grade. A planning was carried out to remedy or reduce the current situation, because, in addition to the delay in literacy, the students had restricted vocabulary, low self-esteem and aggressiveness as a way to mask the discrepancy.

The children of 6, 7 and 8 years old had their fine motor coordination very compromised. They could not handle the mouse or use the keyboard correctly. They had difficulty controlling the strength of their fingers and hands.

At the end of each month, the teachers responsible for each workshop present a report in which they make a brief assessment of the students' performances in the respective activities, in which they can identify gaps and other relevant aspects that are sometimes dealt with in the workshops themselves.

Socio-economic questionnaires are applied annually, helping to know the profile of the public attended, but this result has no direct effect on the actions currently carried out. Exactly for understanding the importance of this process, the project of the Ramacrisna Educational Support Centre is being reviewed and restructured internally.

The aim of this process is to review the pedagogical bases of the project's activities, its long-term objectives and what should be the role of each workshop to ensure that these objectives are achieved.

Every month the teachers of the workshops produce reports on the actions carried out and record therein their assessments of the students' performance in their proposals. The reports have pointed to students with difficulties with the content, concentration and attention to the proposed activities.

Even in the face of difficulties, teachers report interest and motivation of students in the workshops with interest and curiosity aroused by digital tools.

In view of the literacy diagnoses of 2022 and based on the development phases of each age, the neural connections and parts of the brain to be stimulated to achieve the literacy objectives, various strategies were planned to address different intelligences: kinaesthetic, visual and auditory. The curiosity of the students was an essential factor in achieving the results.

For those students who are more visual and auditory, the different resources of the Literacy Desk and the activities carried out in the Internet lab were sufficient. However, for students with synesthetic senses, in addition to the aforementioned resources, it was necessary to present the Literacy Table games in a physical form, so three trays were created, reproducing important tools from the table.

Also in response to the diagnosis that showed motor difficulties in some children, the activities were adapted to achieve success in using the technology. Activities were carried out to strengthen finger muscles and control short hand movements, such as tearing paper and making small balls with them, collage with leaves and sticks, stimulating pincer movement, and self-control. In a few weeks the result was satisfactory. The students manage to execute commands with both mouse buttons, control the "little arrow", as they call it, in the computer work area, carry out activities in Paint or Word, save the file with their names in the class folder and turn off the computer correctly. They know the functions of the keyboards keys. When they forget, they ask and another student clarifies the doubt.

Despite the experience of carrying out activities that complement school education, not having mechanisms to prove the efficiency of CAER's actions is a failing that we have noticed recently and that we are seeking to repair. We understand that building an evidence basis not only provides data to demonstrate the probable success of the actions, but also provides us information to improve and update the workshops carried out.

Furthermore, we understand that when we act based on evidence, we are more resolute and can have more positive impacts on society. Developing an evidence basis for CAER is also a step that can be used later in other sectors of the institute, which has already been measuring its impact in the region since 2018.

The  COVID - 19 pandemic brought different realities and routines than those experienced by our children. Isolation, losses of family members and neighbours, remote and/or hybrid education, unemployment and high rate of infraction, affected not only the CAER public, but its managers and professionals. These and other issues have compromised the emotional, bodily and cognitive development mainly of children.

Allied to this, Brazil's low performance in education in the world scenario, generates devastating effects. A study by the IMD World Competitiveness Center, presents the country as 63rd in relation to the relevance of primary and secondary education for the demands of the productive system / labour market.

CAER's workshops have as main objective to open a "range of opportunities" for these issues to be developed in a sustainable, responsible, dynamic and creative way. This is why it is necessary to know in depth the efficiency indicators of the actions carried out.

- How the learnings provided by CAER are impacting on the participants' educational backwardness?

- What is the impact of the training offered by CAER on participants' cognitive, social and emotional development?

- Which CAER workshops are most effective and which need to be improved or replaced in order to reduce the school gap?

After 12 weeks, we hope to:

- Develop research strategies that can help us to measure the learning provided by CAER, beyond the reduction of the school gap including the development of assessment instruments;

- To obtain a research guideline that will allow us to know the impact of CAER's actions on the cognitive, social, and emotional development of the participants and help us to find ways to measure qualitative information from the project that can demonstrate the project's contributions to the lives of children beyond the academic sphere. 

- To receive guidance on how to understand which CAER workshops are most effective and which need to be improved or replaced in the quest to reduce the school gap, so that we can monitor ourselves annually and then ensure constant improvement of the project in the face of changes in society and the children's schooling.

With research strategies to measure the learning provided by CAER, we will conduct research and data analysis to know the scope of CAER's training actions and the impact on the school gap. Knowing the results, we intend to develop strategies to improve the workshops to maximise the positive impact of the actions. We also intend to turn the evaluation mechanism into a monitoring step to ensure that the actions are constantly revisited and thus we can reduce training failures.

Knowing the impact of CAER's actions on the personal development of children is a valuable tool for the Ramacrisna Institute, because more than delivering quantities of children attended and trained, we are interested in enabling them to know about new ways of living and relating to others, so we can understand how the Institute accomplishes its social role with these children. Elaborating the evaluation mechanisms of this impact and applying these evaluations will be the responsibility of the workshops teachers, in collaboration with the project coordination.

Considering the guidance on the workshops and their efficiency in reducing the school gap, the Institute's project team, together with CAER's coordination, will rethink and propose new workshops if necessary. It is through evaluations and monitoring that the processes of improving actions become oriented and ensure the efficiency and social response of the Institute.

The results of the strengthening of these evidences may help the Ramacrisna Institute to enable partnerships with other institutions that have the same objectives, besides sponsors, public agencies and other interested parties. They can also be subject of partnerships that enable the replicability of the project, taking the support to school education to more students in Brazil.

We hope that in the short term we can achieve a better understanding of the learning effectively provided by CAER and consequently be able to glimpse the needs for improvement and enhancement of actions. We also want to be able to legitimately affirm the contributions of CAER in the personal and social development of the participants and also to be able to develop a plan to improve the current workshops and create new ones, if necessary.

In the long term, we intend to expand CAER's services, once its efficiency in reducing the school gap and in the personal development of the participants is proved, thus being able to take this benefit to other children and young people in the community. We also intend to ensure that the monitoring and evaluations developed during the LEAP Sprint serve as an example and model for the development of other metrics and indicators in other projects of the institution and that they can be carried out independently of external financial resources, thus ensuring the continuity of these mechanisms. The results obtained can also be used to contribute to the measurement of  Ramacrisna Institute social impact, conferring greater reliability and more coverage to this study.