TeacherTraining for Pedagogical & Social Expansion

Currently we have a gap in the offer of public pedagogical extension programs in Brazil for professionals, mainly according to their development needs. This absence of programs take place mostly in areas where children are living in poverty and highly vulnerable situations.
This Pedagogical and Social Expansion through Early Childhood Teachers aims to consolidate and project a reflection on the child, who will receive from his/her teacher, through a consistent and renewed pedagogical practice, a warm welcome and a protective attitude.
On a research carried out at the end of the 2018 program with participating teachers, we verified that in relation to the applicability of the contents of the program:
51% considered within the expectations
49% considered above expectations
Since 2011, 220 teachers have been certified, with an average of 16,000 children.
Working with the same program with tecnology and in scale  we will reach  much more children.

Nowadays in Brazil we still have a high index of poverty and vulnerability involving children in early childhood. "Public early childhood education in Brazil has grown in recent years. The 2009 basic education census shows that there are 1.2 million children enrolled in day care centers. In 2000, that number was 652 thousand. With the expansion of supplyin early childhood education, the demand for qualified teachers also increases."

http://portal.mec.gov.br/compo...

"The federal government resources to help municipalities meet the goal, however, they have fallen. They survey carried out by G1 in December showed that, between 2015 and 2017, the transfers to Brazil Carinhoso, a program to keep poor children from 0 to 48 months in day-care centers, fell by 90%." https://g1.globo.com/educacao/noticia/...

With part of the children already inside the institutions, now our great challenge is to offer quality education. Given the current legislation, by which the teacher training is the Pedagogy Degree, many of the educators study via Distance Learning. These courses have a very theoretical and generalist content, not providing subsidies for the context of the daily work carried out in the elementary education units.

We are currently working for communities located in regions considered to be at high risk of social vulnerability by focusing on the training of early childhood teachers, who often live in the same communities.
Over the last 7 years we have been offering teachers the Childhood Experience - Early Childhood course, and each year we have had a growing number of certified educators. We are very close to this audience of educators because we already work with theoretical and reflective subjects, group dynamics and practical activities, as well as exchanges of experiences that help educators to transform their practices, even encouraging them to "look into the eyes of children talking to them."
Each year we have had more and more requests for the teacher training program to be multiplied and offered in other Brasil states, and for that reason we will create a new program combining recorded classes, webinar and face-to-face meetings, to maintain proximity and human contact, that allows us to reach an immediate multiplication of the content to be applied to the children enrolled in the institutions in different locations.

Our solution’s stage of development: 

The relevance and acceptance of Childhood Experience - Early Childhood project has been continuously proven, as it has been held every year with no interruption, since 2011.

The interest for the course has been multiplied, although it does not offer professional score, it has been disclosed by many participants, who bring new colleagues and who transform the reality in their workplaces, generating strong synergy. 

Childhood Experience - Early Childhood  project OVERVIEW OBJECTIVES:

To release values, offer concepts and provide skills that contribute for an operation aiming to humanize the education at infant age, based on Waldorf Education, Social Ecology, neuroscience of development, and other educational lines. 

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES 

• Broaden the point of view of educators to allow for a better comprehension of child development;
• Offer pedagogic practices that promote emotional, cognitive and motor health to the child.
• Provide teachers with a wide variety of Social Pedagogy tools, in order to improve strong relationship quality among school management, teachers, students and parents. 
• Cultivate a culture of peace, bringing more self-knowledge to the education professionals through study of the Human Biography.
• Train the educator to develop educational toys prepared with natural materials (hand craft).
• Offer a long list of books for reference through the Circulating Library Project (projeto Biblioteca Circulante).
• Offer Pedagogy Support to interns and institutions of participating students.

Currently the course is held annually, certifying an average of 40 educators, and the main goal now is to transform this existing classroom course into a virtual / face-to-face course - so that it can reach a larger audience of teachers, aiming towards Pedagogical & Social Expansion.

The differential of this program is that it is based on Waldorf pedagogy, social ecology and developmental neuroscience, the program aims to improve the quality of early childhood educators practice, offering content through thematic modules and using tools that allow interaction and exchanges of experiences between the participants also through a consistent and renewed pedagogical practice.

More than bringing content and information, what makes our solution innovative is sensitize educators. We work the contents, passing them through the feeling so as to make sense not only intellectually, but for its integral being, within an environment of respect and self-appreciation of the teacher and project a reflection on the child who will receive from his teacher a warm welcome and protective attitude.

Through the multiplication in the distance education format in Brazil and also in Portuguese-speaking countries our aim are to consolidate what was told above using the combination of existing technological resources (podcast, texts for reading, recorded lessons, webinar with the human quality of face-to-face meetings), we intend to multiply the number of people who can receive the contents of the programs with the excellence and experience proven in our program Childhood Experience - Early Childhood.  Through the use of technologies we will reach more people with content replication faster, which would not be possible through the course model we currently offer.

The new solution model that we are proposing is still under study, however, we have already seen the use of smartphones, computers, transmission screens and software such as:
• Spreadsheets
• Web site
• Transmission platforms such as Zoom
• Dissemination through social media such as Facebook and Instagran
• Educational support material provided via "cloud"
• Chat or whatssapp applications
In this area we are talking with specialized professionals to advise the project.

We consider that the pedagogical expansion program we propose covers three dimensions of social impact: promotes an opportunity for development both for the children and their teachers as we work with differentiated pedagogical content and with the development of social capacities of the teacher. As children develop by expanding their abilities, it changes their future life in the following dimensions: reducing vulnerability, expanding possibilities for increasing income, and strengthening citizenship and individual rights.

The Step-by-Step would be as follows: insofar as the teacher understands the developmental needs of the child and changes his practice, for example if the child does not have good motor coordination and allows him to play for longer in the open air, child will acquire bodily and social skills that will impact their future as an adult.
To the extent that the teacher knows himself better, he also resigns his practice and gains more self-confidence.

Considering that in 2020 we will work with 4 classes of 50 teachers and that each teacher attends an average of 25 children, we will have at the end of one year 5000 children benefited. Over the other years we will multiply the number of poles served.

In 2025 the Pedagogical and Social Expansion Program for Teachers of Early Childhood Education is consolidated and projects a reflection on the child it receives from its teacher through a consistent pedagogical practice, warm welcome and protective attitude in early childhood. The program will be multiplied in 50 Brazilian cities by teachers and other qualified and experienced professionals. Thus, we will have 100,000 children benefited by the project, which will increase gradually.

1. Structuring the thematic content modules for the new business model
2. Create a pedagogical management and monitoring model
3. Train team members and local multipliers
4. Build a website that supports the demands of the program
5. Partner with colleagues.
6.Expand the course to other Portuguese speaking countries

For this and the next year:

The public of the program belongs to a social layer with little financial capacity, so the amount of financial contribution to the course is small.

Another important issue that can become a barrier is that the project's initial investment contribution, so that it is ready for start in March 2020, must arrive before the end of 2019. For example, designing the web site, recording the classes, train local teachers for the webinar and face-to-face meeting, transportation costs, etc.

For the next 5 years:

Organize face-to-face meetings in distant locations as well as train professionals to carry them out.

Have a targeted audience mailing at the places where the program will be applied.

Break the paradigm of the possibility of learning and teaching through technology that  already exist in Brazil.

Maintain the quality of the program after it is multiplied.

At this moment we are studying strategies,  technologies, establishing partnerships with experts in each subject.

As for Solve MIT we are organizing the portfolio to request funds before the end of the year for other partners working in Brazil as MAHLE Intitute and Software AG Foundation.

For the next 5 years we intend to form a network of properly trained multipliers, as well as mailing the local public through marketing actions.

We are developing the solution we propose here as a business program since the end of 2018 and for that we are structuring ourselves in the coming months to become a Non Governmental Organization.

We are working on a team of 5 teachers project managers and more than 4 professionals specialized in different areas.

We have experience in the pedagogical and administrative areas and we have developed the Childhood Experienced - Early Childhood with great acceptance of the public of teachers and approval of our sponsors.

We are currently establishing partnerships with the following institutions:
Mahle Institute: supervisor and sponsor
Ecosocial: Advisor and sponsor
Software AG Foundation: sponsor
GAIA- Elderly, Child and Adolescent Assistance Group: where the current program takes place
Association of Social Pedagogy: institutional support
Alliance for Childhood in Brazil: origin of the program

The business model itself is under study.

See the slides in the video below:

https://youtu.be/2ewVpG8kjq4

We have sponsorship since the beginning  of the program however, at the moment we want to reach levels of self sustainability.

The model we are trying to deploy is Fee-for-Service Model because the contribution of the program participants will not be sufficient to maintain the maintenance costs of the program. Therefore, other actions such as educational consulting, sale of teaching materials, etc. should meet the financial needs of the program.

We have reached a stage in our project in which the only impairement is not only money, but technology, promotion and the business model. We believe that Solve's experts and connections can guide us through an accurate development of our site and online resources, such as how to properly record and edit online classes, enabling an even wider reach of our material and training to teachers in Brazil. 

We would also need Solve's help to promote our material properly through social media and others, in order to increase our teachers base. 

Aid would also be appreciated in perfecting our business model to a global standard.

We are open to suggestions for partnerships, but at the moment we are seeing that exchanges of experiences and support from the following institutions would be very valid:
- Google

- Zoom

- Whatsapp

-Facebook

-khan academy

-Já Entendi ( a Brazilian plataform of courses) 

-Municipal governments

At the moment we do not want to compete for the prize.

At the moment we do not want to compete for the prize.

At the moment we do not want to compete for the prize.