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NATIONAL PRIORITIES
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Box 5.8 Building new economy skills: Escuela Nueva in Colombia and
Vietnam
The Escuela Nueva model started in Colombia in 1976 as
an innovation in multigrade teaching, promoting active,
participatory, and cooperative learning among primary
school students. Today it serves 5 million students in 16
countries, including Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico,
the Philippines, Uganda, and Vietnam.
The model is based on several innovations for improving
teamwork and developing critical thinking. The curriculum
is focused on a self-paced and self-directed learning guide.
Group learning is facilitated through the use of learning
guides that contain interactive exercises. Teachers are
trained in group management. Group learning is also fostered
by class arrangements and a modified role of teachers
as facilitators. Students are seated in clusters of four or
five, with teachers guiding, supervising, and evaluating the
children in these groups. The school calendar and evaluations
are flexible, so that children can meet learning goals
at their own pace.
Evaluations of the model in Colombia and elsewhere
indicate that the program is fostering both cognitive and
socioemotional skills. The model improves levels of Spanish
and math in the third and fifth grades, as well as selfesteem
and the abilities to lead others in group tasks and
to work peacefully with others in a team. A recent impact
evaluation of Escuela Nueva’s first two years in Vietnam
shows that the model helps children learn to work with
each other and develop communication and interpersonal
skills. Improved cooperative learning skills also enable a
student to obtain better results in math.
Sources: WDR 2016 team based on Bodewig and others 2014; Colombia Aprende 2015; Forero-Pineda, Escobar-Rodriguez, and Molina 2006; Fundación
Escuela Nueva 2015.
Singapore has also made large changes to its
education system to adapt to the knowledge-based
economy. The main change was in 1997, with a move
from an efficiency-driven model to an ability-driven
model. 45 The efficiency-driven model, an engineer’s
vision to education, had a top-down approach in
designing, disseminating, and enforcing the national
curriculum; streaming students by competency levels
to ensure that teachers were dealing with students
of similar levels; and creating clear but rigid paths to
vocational and tertiary education. While this model
produced students who scored high on international
math and science tests, it produced students who
were not critical thinkers and teachers who were not
motivated. 46 Under the new ability-driven model,
schools have more autonomy over their curriculum
and develop programs to suit their students. More
emphasis is placed on project work, introduced from
primary education onward, with a move from highstakes
examinations to smaller assessments. The
government has also emphasized the use of ICT in
the curriculum.
Whether to streamline teaching new economy
skills into the traditional curricula, as in Finland or
Peru, or whether to teach them in targeted classes
or interventions, as with grit (that is, perseverance
in pursuing long-term goals) in FYR Macedonia,
is an open debate. Even if taught separately, it is
important to reinforce learning these modern skills
across subjects. A teacher could give a lecture on
history with little class interaction, or could break
the class into small groups that would reflect on the
reading material, prepare takeaways, and present
to the whole class, thus teaching history as well as
teamwork, empathy, communication skills, problem
solving, self-regulation, and self-esteem. 47 Changes
can also include introducing more open-ended questions
in home assignments and in tests, more flexible
classroom seating arrangements that allow work in
groups, having discussions involving the full classroom,
and creating spaces in classrooms and schools
for collaborative projects. The increased demands on
teachers need to be accompanied by modernizing
teacher training, both in- and pre-service. Teacher
training needs to focus on how to teach curriculum
content and on how to impart socioemotional skills.
Countries are making progress in improving student
assessments, critical for identifying strengths
and weaknesses in the education system, designing
policy, and strengthening accountability. Yet current
assessments typically focus on testing information,
facts, or the ability to read or perform math operations.
While important foundational skills, these skills
are often fairly routine and easily programmable, so