Student Leadership Program

In article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is stated that: “The States Parties shall guarantee to the child who is in a position to form his or her own opinion the right to express his or her opinion freely in all matters that affect the child, taking into account due account of the child's opinions, depending on the child's age and maturity" (UN, 1990). However, Peruvian students do not participate or act within the education system as key actors. They do not have spaces or opportunities to develop their skills and authentically exercise their own leadership to change their education reality.

According to the Multidimensional Youth Deprivation Indicator, prepared by the OECD Development Center (2017), it is estimated that 2 out of 5 young people in Peru suffer from deprivation in the following dimensions of well-being: education, participation and social inclusion. This is reflected in decision-making spaces and development processes at school, local, regional and national levels. According to El Peruano (2019), this is due to the fact that there is little recognition of youth participation and representation at all levels of Peruvian society. This reinforces the exclusion of youth organizations, initiatives and leadership from the vast majority of decision-making opportunities. Students are often integrated in the implementation, seen only as recipients of services.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (2016), shows that socio-emotional skills have the potential to increase cognitive skills, strengthen self-esteem, communication and teamwork skills in students. These are factors that are essential in any education experience. Therefore, that limited idea of the students' role stands in the way of creating spaces to reinforce and contribute to the development of socio-emotional skills in students. This obstacle can have a negative impact on the learning process.

At Enseña Perú we believe in the power of education and we are convinced that students are the pillar. That is why the Student Leadership Program (PDLE in its acronym in Spanish) was born. PDLE is a transformative, free, virtual and decentralized experience for students from public and private schools in the 3rd, 4th and 5th years of Secondary School who, through a selection process, are chosen to participate.

The program lasts 7 weeks and takes place on weekends, having 2 virtual sessions via Zoom on Saturdays and 2 on Sundays. The pandemic has made it clear that we need to continue betting on socio-emotional work, and has reinforced the importance of continuing to act collectively. The PDLE is positioned as an excellent opportunity to reinforce this priority with its three main modules: self-knowledge, social awareness and collective action. In the first module, looking for students to lead from the heart, the program seeks to explore their stories, fears, desires, vulnerabilities, intra and interpersonal relationships, etc. In the second module, students are expected to perceive, recognize and understand the problems and needs of people in their community. Students explore, analyze, and connect their stories with social and cultural issues, and national and international contexts. Finally, in the third module, together they visualize what the world should be, and make sense of their experiences and actions to produce the desired results. To do this, we provide spaces where students have the opportunity to talk to social entrepreneurs and activists. Subsequently, they formulate their own social proposals.

These modules are designed to promote growth in leadership skills, self-assessment, interculturality, team work, as well as contribute to the development of socio-emotional skills such as flexibility and adaptability, growth mindset, agency, critical thinking and empathy. In this way, the program seeks to build a holistic development ecosystem, focused on self recognition, interpersonal relationships and social transformation.

As part of the program, teenagers begin to create projects to take action in different situations identified as a common problem or need in their communities. Likewise, the participants develop, through the use of technology, tools that allow them to strengthen their leadership skills and grow their own social initiatives. After successfully completing the PDLE, graduates can participate in a Education Leadership Program.

Currently, we are seeking to focus part of the intervention in the Áncash region of Peru. To meet the needs of the territory, we seek to diversify the technological means and language diversity through which the students can participate. These points will be explained in more detail in the following questions.

The students who participate in the PDLE come from different regions of Peru and live in both urban and rural areas. Being in the 3rd to 5th grade of Secondary School, their ages range from 14 to 17 years old. Regarding a psycho-graphic segmentation, when evaluating the applications, we look for students that have started a self-knowledge process, and desire to contribute to their community, but they are in environments that do not necessarily motivate their participation and leadership.

Thus, PDLE serves as an initial dreams and desires connector among students so they can take action on the different problems that inspire them. In addition, by working on developing socio-emotional skills and focusing on self-knowledge, students improve their mentality on how to be better people, students and, in the future, professionals. This is key. A study by McKinsey Consulting Firm on how to improve students' school results based on PISA 2015 data shows that mentality can become twice as important as socioeconomic origin (McKinsey, 2018). Likewise, developing their skills and empowering students with the necessary tools will allow them to be agents of change, taking action with their own initiatives and collective work.

The team is well-position to undertake the project because, for the last 5 years, it has been exclusively dedicated to the Ancash region. Throughout these years, the organization has been escalating in the territory both in magnitude, expanding the number of programs and the scope of each one, and in depth, increasing the number of relationships with regional and local actors. As a team, we always seek to build experiences that ease skill growth in different actors of the education community. This has allowed us to develop a close and trusting relationship with different public institutions in the region, such as the Ancash Regional Directorate of Education (DREA) and the Local Educational Management Units (UGEL). In addition, these relationships have made it possible to identify emerging leadership opportunities with formal authorities in the territory. Different projects are coordinated with these public institutions, both at a regional and local level, to meet the needs of the community. Also, all the members of the Enseña Peru team have experience in the classroom. They are alumni of the Leadership Program, where they had the opportunity to work as classroom teachers and learn about the communities' challenges. Everything mentioned above has allowed us to scale and influence at different levels, starting from the classroom and schools, to the UGEL and DREA. We are currently working on other teacher training and measurement strategies with good results in the region. Now, we believe that it is time to seek opportunities for our students, hand in hand with the regional and local actors.

Regarding the program sessions, these were co-designed hand in hand with students through dialogue spaces to explore their points of view and identify common challenges that will guide the design and characteristics of the sessions.

After the different editions of the program, we are seeking to focus part of the intervention in a region of Peru, Ancash, in order to increase the participation of Ancash students. However, Ancash is a region that has a large connectivity gap since, according to the Peruvian Institute of Economy (2020), 47.8% of households do not have a mobile internet access. As a result, we seek to diversify the technological means to participate in the program. We seek to be able to make the program available through phone calls, text messages and WhatsApp, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence and Bots.

Likewise, the monitoring and evaluation of the program is a great challenge. Although we gather information in some indicators such as self-perception of growth in prioritized socio-emotional skills, we aspire to design a longitudinal study that allows us to evaluate the long-term impact of the program participants. Also, we seek to measure the impact that the projects designed and developed by the participants and alumni of the program in their communities.

Finally, we seek to strengthen the existing curriculum and enable the program also in the native language of the Ancash region: Quechua. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (2017), 30.5% of the Ancash population have Quechua as their mother tongue. In the region there are even provinces such as Mariscal Luzuriaga province, where 92.5% of its population has Quechua as its mother tongue. In addition, we seek to make the program increasingly inclusive, in the future, enabling the program for people with visual disabilities.

What we seek with these three fronts is to strengthen the existing socio-emotional curriculum, as well as the diversity of participants by offering it in a second language and diversifying the ways of participating. To achieve these three points, we are looking for further human, technological and financial resources and necessary alliances.

The first factor that makes our solution innovative is that it hears, from its design and planning, the students' voices. They assume a more active role and thus have a more effective grow in their prioritized socio-emotional skills. A second factor is that PDLE works as an incubator for social project ideas, which, in many cases, is the first step for students to get involved, research and design social impact proposals. We seek to give sustainability to this effort through mentors that support and follow students through the design and execution of these projects. In this way, students will have support and learn from the expertise of mentors. Likewise, we create a youth support network that strengthens the students' interpersonal relationships. Finally, the PDLE methodology starts from working with the participants' vulnerability. Students open up to themselves, recognize their fears, dreams and direct them so that they can improve. In our context, this is a very disruptive proposal of learning. The program encourages students to aspire to achieve their dreams, but also to give back to their community in the long term.

In the following year, we hope that at least 80% of the participants who are part of the Student Leadership Program show growth in three socio-emotional competencies prioritized in the National Curriculum, which are: Manage economic or social entrepreneurship projects, Coexist and participate democratically, and Build their identity. Likewise, we seek that 60% of student participants promote projects with a positive impact on their community, as well as develop and strengthen their academic skills. This will be achieved through the established sessions, and by enabling spaces where the program graduates can continue to be connected. Finally, mentors will be assigned to the projects that are promoted, in order to support the students and contribute to their sustainability.

After students graduate with a passion for learning thanks to the program, showing growth in their skills and activating socially responsible solutions, in five years, we seek to consolidate a student leadership movement that promotes citizen participation and public advocacy in Ancash. As a result, we aspire to have at least 500 active and visible young leaders, who continue to mobilize actions within their context and in favor of their communities. In order to achieve these objectives, we seek to provide a learning opportunities package to the network of PDLE graduates. In this way, a self-managed learning community will be consolidated, where members can continue learning.

We hope that the learning and tools acquired in the Student Leadership Program will allow 60% of graduates to show and apply agency skills that will allow them to take advantage of future opportunities, both professional and academic, to help lay the foundations to exercise their full citizenship. As Aramburu and Nuñez (2019) state in the research "The reasons for fear: early desertion of Beca 18", there are several cases of young people who, after having successfully completed a selection process for scholarship for higher education, decide to reject it, give it up or lose it mainly due to socio-affective and financial factors. Through the program, students have the agency skills to support them in the insertion in these new contexts. It allows them to identify their difficulties, think of feasible and pertinent solutions, find the necessary resources to undertake them and finally act on them.

The seven-week program is measured through a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools. Regarding the quantitative data, this solution has assessment instruments for prioritized socio-emotional skills on in the program such as agency, empathy, sensitivity, growth mentality, among others. These skills are measured at the beginning and at the end of the program, and the instruments have been improved throughout the three editions. Regarding the qualitative data, the self-reports developed by the participants are systematized. In this reports, students share how the program has had an impact in different areas such as better skills to comment on their opinion and greater sense of purpose. Likewise, the satisfaction of the participants is collected in the middle and at the end of the program through a Net Promoter Score (NPS).

As mentioned above, students who graduate from the PDLE then have the opportunity to continue reinforcing what they have learned with the Education Leadership Program. In this, students are assessed in their leadership skills. This program follows a model based on competencies, which consists of four deliveries in the year (February, May, June and November), with a trans-disciplinary approach, taking the lead from an integrative approach, challenging the barriers between the conventional disciplines, and learning through real-world situations. Students present a mobilizing portfolio of all their impact projects, participate in a leadership interview, and develop a reflective leadership essay. 

At Enseña Peru we have a theory of change: If we enable transformative leadership experiences, diverse people will connect based on the purpose of improving education and will deeply know the reality from the education communities; achieving extraordinary changes in others and in themselves. If later, with all that potential, we organize agents of change in a dynamic movement with leadership skills for the country, fundamentally in education; that innovates and acts in a collective and sustained manner, system changes can be generated in our Peruvian education at the national and local levels, which will bring us closer to all students receiving an education with equity and excellence.

Given this theory of change, it was important to define what we understood as system change. Based on the literature of John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, as well as 11 years of experience in the education challenge, we structure 5 necessary conditions to create system change in a territory. Diverse territorial coalition with a high level of trust, generating a common agenda grounded in public policies, creating and executing collaborative interventions, shared measurements that generate a common language, and channeling funds and talent to the territory in a predictable and sustainable manner.

With the PDLE program, we are focusing on strengthening local leadership based on diverse leadership experiences and skill grow for students, where the objective is to achieve population changes that allow the sustainability not only of the program intervention, but of the system change and collective impact that we aim for the territory.

The Student Leadership Program is currently being carried out virtually using the Zoom videoconferencing application as its main tool. Zoom is used to carry out the different sessions and connection spaces. Likewise, throughout the sessions and activities, the participants learn to use other programs such as Slack, which is the main means of communication between the teams and participants along with WhatsApp. Other technologies are used for collaborative learning, such as Mural, Jamboard, Menti, and so on.

The team works hand in hand with students and recent school graduates. In this way, the students themselves have the possibility of leading spaces for other students. This allows the team to have people of various ages and contexts. Likewise, focusing on the program participants, there is a great diversity of student profiles. Our program participants come from both urban and rural schools, as well as from different regions of the country.

In order to make the program more inclusive, we seek to make the program available in the Quechua language, as we mentioned before, as well as in Braille. In this way, Quechua-speaking and visually impaired students will be able to access the sessions. Additionally, by diversifying the ways to carried out the program, internet access will no longer be a limitation to participate.