The Program in Participatory School Leadership

Salvador in Bahia, Brazil

by
Robert Henriques Girling, Ph.D.
and
Katia Siqueira de Freitas, Ph. D.
January 2007

The Programa de Capacitação em Gestão Participativa/Lidere (PGP) started at the Federal University of Bahia in August 1995. During this time the program has employed a project learning approach to
successfully train hundreds of school administrators in
the State of Bahia, Brazil. As a mark of its success, the program was contracted by the city of Salvador to train teachers and administrators at all of the city’s 120 schools.

Goals and objectives of the project

The PGP was established as a pilot project to provide schools in Northeast Brazil with the management skills they needed to deal with a particularly difficult social reality. Northeastern Brazil faces the most challenging conditions with a range of problems from poor buildings and facilities to lack of trained teachers. While there have been recent improvements in Brazil’s educational system, still very few students in Northeast Brazil attend or graduate from secondary school. The PGP grew out of a recognition that in order to achieve sustained change it is necessary to provide training in leadership, team building, school finance, evaluation and the principles of shared governance to schools in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil’s third largest city).

The program established a series of objectives:

• To strengthen educational leadership in schools in Northeast Brazil
• To provide training in team building, budgeting, school planning, educational evaluation, curriculum and communication
• To assist municipalities in democratizing the management of schools
• To provide support and training to public and private agencies working to improve public education in Brazil
• To disseminate research on applied school administration

The guiding belief behind this project has been that administrative decentralization can help to improve the effectiveness of public schools in Bahia. The PGP is unique in that it brings faculty members from the University together with students into public schools to train school personnel
while carrying out research on the process of administrative decentralization.

Partnerships and Problem Based Learning

How this works is that a team of two or three graduate students is assigned responsibility for each school. They visit their school monthly to work with the school team to identify the school’s needs and to implement a program of staff development and problem solving in order to meet those needs.

What this means is that a partnership is established between the school and the university. Students benefit by gaining insight into the daily operation of the school and a broad overview of administrative issues as well as training in a methodology for school improvement.

Evolution of the project

The project began modestly in 1995 working with just six pilot schools and ten graduate students. Following an initial phase of developing its curriculum and testing its methodology, the PGP was invited to join with efforts to train school leaders throughout Northeast Brazil as participants in a World Bank program of school improvement. As the program established credibility, more and more municipal schools requested assistance. And beginning in 2002, the Municipality of Bahia comprising some 200 schools asked the PGP to develop a program of leadership training for all of its schools. Today the program and its staff of 40 volunteers and students are committed to working with 80 schools serving a population of 40,000 students over the next three years.

Through a series of extensive outreach efforts comprised or informational meetings, professional presentations at ANPAE, ANPED and other regional meetings the PGP has attained national recognition.

Contributions to Scholarship

At the level of the University, the PGP provided the nucleus for the graduate concentration in educational administration; this course of study did not exist prior to the Ford Foundation’s funding for the PGP. The PGP has been successful in creating a cadre of young scholars who have contributed to the level of research and publication with over 40 masters and doctoral students and 5 professors. It is the second largest area of concentration of graduate students at the UFBa and recent graduates now serve on the Faculties of Catholic University in Salvador and a variety of other State universities. Postgraduate programs in educational administration have
been established at several regional universities with assistance from the PGP staff.

A total of 5 Ph.D. and 15 M.A. theses have been completed between 1996
and 2002. In addition, a total of 17 Ph.D. and 11 MA theses are in the process of completion. In 1998, the founders of the PGP published a textbook [A Escola Participativa], which elaborates the program’s methodology and conceptual framework. This book has been adopted as a textbook in the training of administrators by the Secretaria de Educacao for the State of Bahia. It is now in its 4th edition and is distributed nationwide.

Meanwhile, through two professional journals, Girir and Gestão em Acão the project has contributed to the promotion and
dissemination of applied educational research in the field of school democratization.

The Role of the Ford Foundation

From the beginning of the development of this project, the President of Ford Foundation Brazil, Dr. Nigel Brooke played an instrumental technical and developmental role. To begin with the project could not have occurred at all without the financial assistance of the Ford Foundation. Although the start-up and indeed the entire project costs have been quite limited, no other source of funding for a project of this sort was available. The willingness of the Foundation to take a risk on an innovative and entrepreneurial project was unusual. Responding to a series of searching questions such as how would the program reproduce itself and how could the program achieve sustainability led to several innovative solutions.

For example, the PGP was been able to obtain funding from a variety of governmental and non-governmental sources

Lessons learned

This program of activities provided a multitude of lessons to all involved.

1. School improvement is a long-term process, which requires a long-term commitment.
2. Building credibility requires a long-term commitment in which flexibility is essential in the design and implementation.
3. Practice what you preach; the program has evolved by responding to the needs of schools and listening to the students who provide the weekly training sessions.
4. Develop strategic alliances with the community. Schools are organic systems which evolve with changing personalities and changing conditions.
5. Finally, leadership is critical to the success of schools; Successful schools have school principals who are committed to acting on Christ inspired values of love for the students and teachers.