Teach For All – Action Learning to Improve Educational Opportunities in Colombia

Teach For All and Enseña por Colombia partnered with HundrED to document and showcase the implementation of their Action Learning approach for holistic student development in the Uraba region, Colombia. Together, we created a short documentary and implementation case studies to showcase the pioneering work and provide a platform for local voices.

The Teach For All network focuses on collaborative learning and research on how to support students' holistic development and foster leadership of everyone in the classroom. The Teaching as Collective Leadership (TACL) framework guides teachers in growing students into leaders of a more just and sustainable future. 

In 2022, Teach For All, Enseña por Colombia (ExC) and the Universidad de los Andes tailored the TACL framework to respond to the Colombian context. The Uraba region has a long history of conflict, so the adaptation focused on developing teachers’ and students’ social emotional skills to help them create meaningful change in their communities and strengthen peace both inside and outside of school. Using the Action Learning approach, partners created a repository of over 100 social emotional learning (SEL) practices, provided teachers and teacher coaches training, and then gathered continuous feedback from practitioners to iterate the SEL programme further. The implementation was paired with a rigorous academic study to evaluate how well the adaptation supported teachers and impacted student academic performance, as well as their social and emotional skills. 

In this project, we summarised the work and interviewed participants from teachers to researchers to management, to share the learnings with the world. Watch the short documentary and dive into the Implementation Journey to learn how to adopt the Action Learning approach yourself.