HGSE Hosts Brazilian Educators on Campus

A high-level delegation of education leaders from Brazil were hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently as part of an ambitious, multiyear research and innovation project on education leadership development in the country.

“Education leaders in Brazil are very seriously committed to improving the quality and relevance of education. They know that to do this, the next frontier is to advance efforts beyond the basic competencies which are at present the focus of their educational improvement efforts,” says Professor Fernando Reimers, who is the principal investigator of a research collaboration with the country. “This visit was an opportunity [for the Brazilian educators] to learn from similar efforts in Massachusetts, in the city of Cambridge, and in the United States, and to engage in conversation with some of our leaders of thought and practice who share similar aspirations for our schools.”

The seminar — promoted through a collaboration between HGSE and the Center for Public Policy and Educational Evaluation (Centro de Políticas Públicas e Avaliação da Educação, or CAEd) of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil — focused on education reform, specifically U.S. efforts to develop 21st-century skills through teacher education, leadership development, and the definition of standards for teachers and school leaders. It presented to Brazilian state leaders a deep, contemporary view of the American educational system’s major accomplishments and challenges.

Over the course of three days, 57 senior leaders from 20 different Brazilian states spent time at HGSE where they had opportunities to discuss the challenges of leadership development with Dean Kathleen McCartney; Professors Hiro Yoshikawa, Jack Shonkoff, and James Honan; Assistant Professor Martin West; Lecturer Karen Mapp; and Senior Lecturer Paul Reville, secretary of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Some topics discussed included the development of standards, accountability, early childhood development services, and accreditation.

Maria Izolda Cela Coelho, the secretary of education of Ceará State in Brazil, says the seminar was an excellent opportunity for her to reflect on relevant issues of public education improvement, such as the promotion of high-quality learning among students, performance gap reduction between different social groups, and the implementation of curricula focused on the development of 21st-century skills.

Cela Coelho also enjoyed the high quality of the speakers, all of them senior representatives of their respective fields of interest, and the opportunity learn from the successes of some of the people involved in large-scale evaluation in Massachusetts.

“It is a state that has been obtaining relevant results since it took up the challenge of implementing educational reforms with the aim of guaranteeing to everyone the right to a good education,” Cela Coelho says. “Although, of course, the American experience is not easily replicable in Brazil, it allows the elaboration of comparative analyses that are highly inspirational for us, committed to the improvement of public basic education in Brazil.”

Part of the visit also included discussion of how HGSE could further support innovation and impact at scale in cultivating education leadership to advance 21st-century skills in Brazilian schools. Additionally, Reimers says, the collaboration with Brazil gives HGSE faculty and students an opportunity to learn, share their knowledge, and collaborate with leaders in advancing educational innovation.

“The high-level roundtable that took place at HGSE is one more step in this long-term collaboration as we advance understanding of how best to align education systems with the needs of the 21st century,” Reimers says.

Directly following their days at HGSE, Reimers brought the delegation to Washington, D.C. to meet with senior officials in the U.S. Department of Education and other leaders involved in teacher education and standards reforms.