Changing lives through education

I am the Regional Director of Varkey Foundation Latam, a global organization that trains and empowers teachers worldwide.

I have developed various programs to improve the standards of education. As a result, more than 12,000 principals and teachers have been trained, reaching more than 1.5 million students. The main program is today a Harvard Business School case study, highlighting it’s quality and professionalism.

I founded the Latin American Coalition for Excellence in Teaching, a group of high profile experts that works to design new policies on teachers' careers. I am also leading Atlantis Group, an international coalition of former Ministers of Education, that encourages dialogue and strengthening public education systems. Six years ago I founded FormarHub Foundation, an organization that brings a vast range of young leaders of every background and discipline to connect and transform education in Latam.

Eradicating poverty and providing quality, equitable and inclusive education for all are two closely related Sustainable Development Goals (SDO). Education provides skills that increase job opportunities and income, while helping to protect people from socio-economic vulnerabilities and increase resilience, because it prepares them to deal with risks. I’m committed to ensuring the right to education because I believe it enables the fulfilment and guarantee of other human rights. 

I propose to train school principals in leadership and innovation because they are the facilitators of transformation. A great school leader has a direct impact on teachers in classrooms, and therefore on students, resulting in better learning achievements. Empowering and training teachers and school principals is the only way to improve education outcomes. 

Investing in teachers is investing in humanity because it enables each person to reach their potential by discovering their skills and desires. Teachers shape the generations of the future.

In 2017, only 45% of children between 10 and 18 years old in Argentina managed to finish high school, 59% of children who enter middle school do not finish in the stipulated time. Poverty and indigence rates are extremely alarming in Argentina. According to the Institute of Statistics and Censuses, in 2017, 40% of children were in a situation of poverty, and of the total number of indigent people, 35% correspond to children from 0 to 14 years old.

Argentina has more than 1500 institutions to train teachers, but none to train school principals. In this scenario, and considering that the school is the place par excellence to provide equal opportunities, from the Varkey Foundation we train educational leaders in order to be prepared to respond to these needs. We opened 5 Innovation Centers and have been implementing the Educational Leadership and Innovation Program (PLIE, for it’s Spanish acronym) since 2016, training more than 12000 school principals. With them we design innovation projects to improve each of their communities. Turning them into agents of change, we consider this intervention as part of a process to generate a spillover effect on teachers and an impact on students and the education system.

At the Varkey Foundation Latam we design and implement training programs for school principals and teachers. With an entrepreneurial culture inside the organization and the goal to elevate the status of teachers, we adapt each program to the specific needs of our target audience. We have been training teachers and principals successfully across the region for four years. 

Due to the pandemic, we decided to carry out a series of surveys to better understand the situation and adapt our work. As a result of listening and reflection, we designed the following programs:

1. “Comunidad Atenea”, a learning platform where teachers are the center of a collaborative experience, impact-based sharing innovation, and work with peers.

2. “Virtual community of leaders”, a network of school principals based on pedagogical leadership, distributed leadership, and leadership in context. 

3. Innovation Studio, a safe environment for teachers to learn hands-on the most relevant didactic practices to improve their classes. It provides technological tools to bridge the gaps created by the pandemic.

4. Project-Based Learning, one of our most important face to face programs that has now been implemented fully online with high interaction between the participants.
   

Our educational programs are characterized by their impact, evidence, support, and ability to contextualize. The development of the programs imply not only the design according to the specific needs of the places where we work, but also the work with local experts. Each participant of our programs design an innovation project and each project is different as challenges are different. I can recall many stories of transformation after completing the program. Marcela, a school principal in Jujuy, changed the whole evaluation process of her students. Before, the dropout was more than 60% in the first year, now, it reduced to less than 10%.

This is one example out of many. We run an intermediate evaluation result analyzing the impact in more than 500 schools. We interviewed teachers who hadn’t come to the program but their headteachers had, and more than 90% mentioned that they had noticed changes in the school after the program. 70% of them were part of the innovation project, as they aim to build distributional leadership and collaborative communities.

Teachers matters. Every day, in classrooms around the world. But too often, their work goes unrecognized and unrewarded. We work not only building capacities but recognizing outstanding teachers to shed light on the expertise and capacity of them worldwide. We give those who work in the front line of education the voice they deserve, to influence policy and practice. We have seen how education elevates humanity and inspires others to act for social good. This is why, through great teachers, we want to give opportunities for every student. Education can change the course of lives.

I finished my master’s in May 2016 at Georgetown University in the US and applied for a job I really want, it was to work in Dubai organizing one the biggest education conferences, the Global Education and Skills Forum, that the Varkey Foundation does every year. They called me, but for a project in Argentina, my home country. The minister of education asked the foundation to design and implement a project to transform school leaders.

For me was a life-changing event. Overnight I was named Country Director and quickly moved back home.

In October 2016 we launched the first cohort in the province of Jujuy and then four more provinces followed. Each launch involved forming a new provincial team that reflected the dynamics of the program and was flexible to respond to the particularities of each province, individual needs, strengthen the program's curriculum design, and adjust the approach to replace the single-driver paradigm with collaborative work and team building. Since then we have been working to empower principals and teachers to achieve a real transformation in education system, 12000 schools leaders have been part of our programmes in Argentina.

An inadequate education is a major factor behind the social, political, economic, and health issues faced by the world today. I believe education has the power to reduce poverty, prejudice, conflict and is the answer to every problem. Nearly 60 million people could escape poverty if all adults had just two more years of schooling. If all adults completed secondary education, 420 million people could be lifted out of poverty, reducing the total number of poor people by more than 50% globally.

Education is not at the top level agenda. It's always mentioned but not discussed as we need. Many times we hear about education systems failures and our answer always is: education is not a problem, education is the solution. I'm convinced education is the way to solve our problems and in order to do that we need actors from different sectors to get involved. I'm passionate about education and I work hard to make it a priority for other leaders. 

I believe in the work we do everyday in an effort to achieve the transformation of schools and have the conviction that all our efforts reflect real changes.

I’ve dedicated my career to education by strengthening the capacity of leaders and elevating the status of teachers.

 By addressing education challenges with innovative private-public partnerships: Given the broken state of education in Argentina, I worked to bring excellence in the form of innovative organizations from around the world to partner with public institutions and Government at a time when austerity meant that we had to do more with fewer resources. I have built an organisation that trains teachers in partnership with regional governments, which is now scaling beyond one country.

 Through advocacy, I was able to bring investment to the education sector from governments, philanthropy, and NGOs. Is my goal to have leaders from across sectors discussing and improving education. In the past five years, I created hubs of business people, judges, unions, governments, universities, and think tanks to discuss education, always with teachers and principals at the table. I believe in a multi-stakeholder approach.

 Responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. We mainly hear about health and economic responses to the crisis, but we need to scale solutions on educational challenges. I created a virtual platform called “Comunidad Atena”, a collaborative learning community among teachers in Latin America; a place for teachers to get inspired, share practices, plan classes, and learn together. In just three weeks more than 15,000 teachers have enrolled in this community supporting each other in this complex situation. We implemented courses to support them through WhatsApp, reaching a community of more than 60,000 teachers.

With schools closed nationwide in almost every country due to the coronavirus pandemic, most of us had to adapt to new ways of working. 

During this time I was able to take advantage of the crisis situation and transform it into a new opportunity of real growth. The first action was to listen to the teachers whose reality took an unexpected turn. With my team, we made a survey to find out which were their concerns in order to answer to their needs. 92% said what worried them the most was how to continue to teach with the classrooms closed. I decided to advance in two parallel ways: convert all our on-site training into online training and launch a virtual learning community, Comunidad Atenea. More than 50 educators from our team have been teaching in live YouTube videos, whatsapp conversations and one to one follow-up. These training have been enriched by the teacher’s exchange and response in Comunidad Atenea were they find not only pedagogical content but peers support.

Till now, more than 10000 belong to this community standing together in this complex and challenging situation.

I have a great interest in bringing people together and constantly looking for strategic alliances. I am convinced that the best solutions come when working with others. As a leader, I work to add value to education by bringing the best to work in the sector. When I opened the Latin American office, I had to build the organization from scratch, an effective team of over 80 people in less than a year. We started with the Educational Leadership and Innovation Program as a pilot in the province of Jujuy which in less than three months we were replicating in other provinces of Argentina, in Corrientes, Mendoza, Salta and later in the province of Buenos Aires. I think part of my ability is having built a great team that can adapt to new challenges and face changes.

Today we have different programs, Comunidad Atenea, a virtual community of leaders, Innovation Studies, a program of Project Based Learning and we continue to innovate based on the needs of managers and teachers, focusing on improving the quality of education and expand to other countries to continue to raise teacher training in every corner of the world.