Baja Teachers Complete Binational Pilot Program

A group of 20 Mexican teachers graduated from a binational pilot education program aimed to provide better skills to students who travel within Mexico and the United States, specifically between the Cali-Baja region. 
The pilot project initiated on July 20, 2016, and began after an agreement between the Baja California State Education System and the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE). Based on the Guided Language Acquisition and Design (GLAD) system, the pilot project will provide teachers with new skills and practical approaches for teaching foreign students. Subjects such as math, history, and science will now be easier to learn, even while in another country. 
“The intention is to certificate 20 teachers based on GLAD that will collaborate with teachers in the United States to implement the new skills,” said Yara Amparo Lopez Lopez, coordinator of the binational program of migrant education of the State Education System in Baja California. “The idea of the collaboration is to create a partnership between the two countries to better look after the transnational students we receive, they study a part of their life in Mexico, and another part in the United States.” 
Almost 57,000 students of the K-12 system in Baja California are foreigners that attend public schools, and 98 percent of them are from the United States. 
“These kids in a moment of their life they have already moved between the two countries, or will move in a later date”, Lopez Lopez said. “This means we are sharing students, we have students that will educate within the two countries.” 
The training consisted of two days in July were the teachers learn about second language development theory and strategies. The second part of the training, the teachers visited a third grade classroom with students in Tijuana, where the teachers watched GLAD trainer Melanie McGrath implement the strategies they learned in the first two days. 
“The purpose was to teach teachers how to teach English language development,” McGrath said. “Is the very first time that project GLAD has had a binational training, and these are the teachers that are pioneers of this project, and hopefully we are going to be able to have more trainings like this in the future.” 
The idea is to get the rest of Mexico’s Education System on board with the project. 
“Both countries will benefit of having the knowledge of what we need to do to help our students to be bilingual and to have both cultures,” CABE board member, Norma Sandoval said. “We need to understand that language doesn’t end at the border line, we need to increase the possibilities in both sides of the border.”