Innovations in measuring leadership capacities across Latin America

• In Event: The impact of developing collective leadership: From student holistic outcomes to systemic change

Proposal

Collective leadership is a critical component of Teach For All's mission to ensure that all children can reach their full potential. By fostering collaboration and shared decision-making among educators, administrators, and community members, collective leadership can transform local education ecosystems and drive systemic change. To support this work, Teach For All partnered with the Center for Expanding Leadership & Opportunity (CELO) to test a set of tools to measure collective leadership, and developed other innovative tools internally for piloting across four partners in Latin America: Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Colombia. Combining established global tools with new, locally adapted tools embodies our core value of being locally rooted while globally informed.

This presentation will detail the development process of this toolset, including the large-scale pilot conducted with participants of all four partner countries. We will also discuss the development of a common scale for all measurement constructs, ensuring consistency and comparability across contexts. The findings from the pilot phase will illuminate the structure of the main leadership construct and its psychosocial subcomponents, exploring how these elements interrelate and offering insights into the dynamics of collective leadership.

The presentation will also highlight the wide-ranging implications of this work, including how the development process informs future cross-national assessments, particularly in the domain of social-emotional learning (SEL). The findings from this study contribute to a growing body of research on collective leadership and SEL, offering valuable insights for educators, policymakers, and researchers alike.
Overall, this presentation showcases Teach For All's commitment to fostering collective leadership as a means of improving educational outcomes for all children. By providing a deeper understanding of the structure and dynamics of collective leadership, the presentation aims to inspire and guide future efforts to build more collaborative and effective educational systems.

Author

• Alvin Vista, Teach For All