The first day of school will be on the later side this year in Guatemala.: teachers are coming for their first day in mid-February and the students will start on Feb. 20th. It will be a “normal” start, with full classes and students being present 5 days a week. This was not the case for the past 3 years when schools were either totally closed or operating in “bubbles”, with students coming only 2 or 3 days a week to school.

All 12 current schools (6 from Olintepeque and 6 from Cantel) have expressed interest in continuing with the TINFA program for their 2nd year. and are meeting the criteria for continuation. This means that we will be able to start the school year very efficiently, just where we left off.

There will be several new teachers (teachers that are new to their school or new to their 4th, 5th and 6th grade), but we expect that about 75% of the teachers will on their 2nd year with us. We are making updates to our Advanced class curriculum (Video Production and Editing, Canva, Coursera, WordWall, etc…), so that most teachers at that level last year will find new materials to work with this year. Subsequently, the Intermediate and Basic training is being updated as well.

One important consideration is how the classes will be taught. We want to capitalize on what we have learnt during Covid. Some training can be efficiently taught online. We also learn from last year’s hybrid setting, that the quality of a class, in certain settings, is much higher if it is in person. (It is hard to have a virtual class when the teacher is in the school for example, and can easily be interrupted by students, parents or administrators). We will start with few intense full day classes in person and move to virtual classes after the first couple of months, having set expectations and teachers have a good setting to study.

We will of course start the year with an assessment, so that we have the baseline to evaluate the progress our partners are making.

On to another good year of learning!