Why we do it?
First and foremost, we are educators. We believe that the education system needs to change. At Coschool, we are particularly obsessed with figuring out the answer to this question: "How might we develop the character skills/life skills of young people in Colombia and Latin America?". We all know by now that young people need to develop these skills, but there are few examples of successful methodologies or models of how to do so.
How we do it?
Since 2014 we have been working with schools across the country on several types of project that aim to support schools, teachers, and students to develop skills such as self-awareness, empathy, determination, and decision making in youth. We are organising our approach in our own model, called Edumoción. We run programs for teenagers, teachers and school directives and implement the methodology in a variety of formats.
We focus our work increasingly on teachers and school leaders and recently (late 2018 and 2019) won major grants from Gates Foundation, Templeton Foundation and Fondation Botnar to build scalable initiatives in this area.
We are focussed on measuring our work and proving what works (and what doesn't) so that we can start to help Governments in Colombia and Latin America make better investments in social & emotional learning. We have worked with 250 + schools, in 10+ regions of the country, impacting over 20,000 students and 7,500 teachers. We are now starting to expand our work outside of Colombia in Peru and El Salvador.
Covid-19
With Covid-19 we discovered the importance of developing initiatives that will reach every teacher and student in our country, taking into account the lack of internet accessibility in rural areas of Colombia. We have united forces with different organizations in order to make our contents available in various formats to the communities.
With the Ministry of Education we were able to compile SEL contents from different actors in Colombia to present them all together for teachers in a Webpage designed for it. Additionaly, we developed a radio program for teenagers in order to reach the regions where we had been working in-person and where internet is not the best option to continue the activities. We have created booklets for other regions and Whatsapp gaming strategies in order to continue impacting the communities.
We have new partners with whom we are creating different virtual courses and platforms that will reach several LatinAmerican countries. This courses address various issues that the region confront and are directed to more than one group.
