Strengthening the Capacity of School Principals in Rural Guatemala

This Workshop in Sustainable Development Practice project, conducted for Pencils of Promise (PoP), aimed at providing recommendations to inform the design of trainings on the topics of leadership, school management, and community engagement for school principals in rural communities of Guatemala. To achieve this goal, the workshop team was tasked with (i) analyzing, from a conceptual perspective, if and how skills related to leadership, management, and community engagement affect school and student outcomes; and (ii) providing contextualized recommendations on specific topics for PoP to prioritize in their training efforts, as well as recommendations on specific tools and strategies to implement within prioritized topics. The SIPA team managed to demonstrate that there is indeed a relation between skills related to leadership, management, and community engagement with school and student outcomes. Additionally, through the use of frameworks, literature, and in-country data collection, the SIPA team prioritized five topics within the dimension of people engagement for PoP to focus on, and provided a set of six tools and strategies for potential principals' trainings in this dimension.