This is a continuation of my account of TEDxPatagonia, an incredible event that I had the great privilege to attend.

Yasna Jelencic began her speech with a simple statement: “Yo soy una profesora orgullosa.” I am a proud teacher. Then she explained the long and somewhat humiliating path that brought her to this point of pride.

Her friends doubted her decision, and made her feel very small and powerless. On stage, she put on her delantal, the bell-shaped smock that students of pedagogía all must wear to the university.  This garment basically stigmatizes people who have decided to devote their careers to educating the next generation.  She would hide her delantal while riding the bus to school, and put it on at the very last minute.

This image comes from tiempo21.cl, a Chilean news website. This is what a Pedagogía class at a Chilean university looks like. All female, and all wearing the same delantal. Students from other majors wear normal street clothes.

During this TED Talk, Yasna wore her delantal with pride. Her delantal gives her the power to create new opportunities for the next generation.

After graduation, she taught at a private school in Santiago, but didn’t feel like she was having the maximum impact possible.  She cited a statistic: in private schools, the teacher only has 10% of the impact on a student’s growth, because the parents have already invested so much in their children.

She then joined OPTE (oportunidad para transformar educando) and went to teach in Temuco, in the south of Chile, a poorer, colder, and more indigenous region.  Her fellow teachers in Temuco rode the bus 1.5 hours to get to school, or lived on campus, and the school lacked proper bathrooms.  Here she started to really feel like she was making an impact as a teacher.

The next year, as a 26th birthday and wedding gift, OPTE gave her a marvelous gift: a school called Niño Levántate. Niño Levántate had the 4th-lowest standardized test scores in all of Chile. The school is in Peñalolén, a community in Santiago.

I volunteered in the same neighborhood when I was studying here in Chile in 2005.  Peñalolén is on the eastern (wealthier) side of Santiago, near the foothills of the Andes.  Several years back, a real estate developer owned a large tract of land here. In the middle of the winter, hundreds of poor families moved in and fought off the police.  These families built houses and roads and little shops there — a pretty impressive feat of social organization, albeit of questionable legality. An American girl named Karina wrote her thesis on the Toma de Peñalolén (“toma” means “take”). She then won a grant to start a library in the Toma. She got book donations from American publishers (like The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Spanish translation) and set up a simple library in a portable classroom.  While volunteering in that library, I got to know several children and families, and this gave me a broader understanding of Yasna Yelencic’s challenge at Niño Levántate.

Her first order of business as the school’s new principal: change the name.  Niño Levántate means, “kid, stand up.” It was as if the students were all on the floor, and their underachieving was their fault.  The school’s new name was Colegio Puelmapu.  Puelmapu is a Mapudungun word meaning “land of the east.” The Mapuche are the main indigenous group in Chile, and Mapudungun is their language.

Along with this new name, she changed the entire attitude of the school. Other teachers said things like, “here the kids are poor, there’s a roof to what they can achieve.”  She did not believe this. She repositioned the school as a leader within this community, with concrete goals and better processes to help students acheive them.  With this, came a massive increase in the student’s standardized test scores.

I am no expert in Chilean standardized testing, but that graph speaks for itself!

She then said that the most influential factor in the student success is the quality of their teachers.  She invited us all to become leaders in this great movement.

Here’s Yasna explaining why she became a teacher:

I later asked her how her organization, OPTE, was related to Enseña Chile (the local version of Teach for America).  She said that OPTE and Enseña Chile have the same goal, but different ways of achieving that goal.  OPTE encourages students to study pedagogía and become professionally trained teachers.  Enseña Chile invites high-achieving students from all majors to make a two-year commitment to teach in low-achieving schools.

She also invited me to visit the students at Colegio Puelmapu.  Gracias Yasna!

Elige Educar (Choose to Teach) is a program sponsored by the Chilean government and other organizations, that encourages young people to choose to teach. Above is a button on the Elige Educar website.  Here’s my translation:

We know that one phrase can change your life. For this, train with the best. The people that study education are those who scored low [on the college entrance exam]. If you are an excellent student, you will enter an elite group that, with the support of organizations like Elige Educar, will lead this change.