Declaration Strengthened School Leaders

This post is also available in: Español 

Max Fischer / Pexels / CC0

School leadership has taken on renewed importance in the educational debate in Latin America. Particularly during the last two years, it has been recognized as a critical factor in the development of new generations facing a world with new and greater challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many teachers to transform their pedagogy, classrooms, and classes to guarantee students' learning continuity. In turn, principals have faced new challenges, for which their roles' transformation is essential, as well as their guidance to continuously support teachers to develop their own leadership.

Organized within the framework of the Regional Program "Leadership for Change" of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Teach For All, and Inter-American Dialogue, the Working Group "Empowered School Leaders" was launched with the goal of building consensus and codifying the leadership skills of teachers and school principals, as well as promoting a shared vision of peer leadership in the context of the pandemic. 

This declaration originates from discussions held during three virtual workshops, along with the findings of a survey designed by the working group and applied to over a thousand teachers and principals across more than 18 countries. The document contains key messages and recommendations to continue strengthening the leadership of teachers and principals in the region. 

Read the Declaration

Recommendations: 

• The pandemic has confronted school leaders with challenges that depend directly on the contexts and needs of their communities. To address these challenges, they require knowledge of local dynamics and national guidelines to make the best decisions for their educational centers. Therefore, ministries should approve an exception regime for the next two years, providing management teams with additional decision-making capacity and authority.         
• Education authorities are advised to design relevant, contextualized, and accessible diagnostic and formative assessment tools, both online and in-person, allowing teachers to quickly determine their students' baseline, analyze results, and make decisions for their daily instructional practices. Additionally, school authorities should urgently promote curricular flexibility and adaptation to prioritize the teaching of basic content.
• Through public-private partnerships, authorities, companies, and the third sector must jointly sustain and strengthen the design and access to platforms and tools that have remotely ensured educational access for multiple communities.
• Educational institutions should create and promote spaces for socio-emotional attention for teachers and management teams, so that they are the first to benefit from comprehensive well-being, which will have an immediate impact on their students and the educational community.
• There is currently a wide range of resources for strengthening socio-emotional skills, digital competencies, and basic learning. However, effective articulation is urgently required to prevent atomized efforts that produce low-quality budget investment and deepen inefficiencies in the education system.

WITH SUPPORT OF: