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the 1970’s into the early 2000’s made education lower in priority than the basic safety and survival of

Peruvian citizens. Therefore, up until recently, there wasn’t as much regulation on educational quality or

requirements placed on teachers as there are in the United States. To illustrate this, Peru’s Department of

Education created an aptitude test to evaluate teachers’ competence in education and around 50% of the

current teachers at the time failed that test. However, it wasn’t reasonable nor was it ethical to fire that many

teachers at one time - therefore, many of the teachers who are technically deemed unqualified for their jobs

(based on the test) are still making up a large percentage of the teacher population in the country. Overall,

teachers have less educator training; however, it is not one individual’s fault but, rather, a lasting result of

Peruvian history. The country is taking steps to better their education system, but it’s a very long process.

Taking all of this context into consideration in the first few weeks, we decided to structure our Capstone

project around all of the country/community context and the school’s most striking problems (based on both

observations and conversations with our teachers and the principal). The problem that was definitely the most

noticeable for all of us and, thus, the one we chose to focus on, was the students’ overall behavior. Whether it

was during independent work time, group work time, transitions in between blocks, during instruction, or any

other classroom happenings, students’ behavior was very chaotic. Students would yell at the teacher, say “no”

to or outright ignore instructions, hit each other, insult each other, get up and run/dance around, talk during

instructions, leave without notice, play with toys, throw materials, grab materials from others, completely

disengage from tasks, etc. Because of this, there was an immense amount of inefficiency in the classroom.

Since it was difficult to focus students based on their behavior, both instruction and assignments were slowed

greatly. Solely because of student behavior, student learning was being negatively impacted in many ways

(the inefficiency, lack of retention due to distraction, classroom time not being taken seriously, etc.) This

phenomenon wasn’t due to the students being significantly different than other students that we had worked

with. Rather, it was due to a complete lack of structure, accountability for the students, or any other form of

behavior management employed by the teachers, despite their constant frustration with student behavior. After

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