By Javier López Martínez, Barrie Foundation, Spain

Earlier this year, as part of a series of meetings in NY and Washington, DC organized by the U.S. State Department, a delegation of Spanish foundations met with our staff at Exponent Philanthropy. We are pleased to share this post from our new friends at Barrie Foundation in Galicia, Spain, an exemplar of leadership and leverage.

More than two years ago, one of the most innovative teachers in Spain, Jesús Garrido, set out his vision of how teaching could be improved.

“Javier,” he said, “we need to learn from excellent teachers.” Jesús is a sprightly 80-year-old teacher who has directed schools, trained some of the best teachers in Spain, and driven major innovation projects in education, such as bringing newspapers into schools. And with all his experience and wisdom he says “the problem is we don’t know what an excellent teacher does in the classroom. It’s as if we are watching a Lakers game on TV and the producer decides to point the camera elsewhere just when Kobe Bryant is about to shoot.”

More recently, Joseph Renzulli , director of the Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talented Development at Connecticut University, who we invited in June to talk to Spanish teachers about the importance of identifying and advancing talent in the classroom, insisted that the key lies in developing teacher’s skills so they become facilitators of learning.

In reality Jesús and Joseph’s proposal is simple: We train future teachers using the professional insight of excellent teachers. We reward good teachers and turn them into role models, instructors for newcomers. And to do this we have to find out what a great teacher does in the classroom, what makes his or her teaching style different. We all remember a teacher who inspired us. Maybe we do not remember why, but we do know that he or she was in some way special. And if we ask some of those teachers most widely appreciated and respected by pupils and colleagues alike what their secret is, it is more than likely that they will humbly reply “it’s nothing special”! Well that “nothing special” is exactly where we will find the answer to our questions, and it is precisely what we at the Barrie Foundation are looking for.

How do we go about this? Through our PROFEX21 project, we have spent time observing and recording some of our best teachers “on the job.” We have made their classrooms transparent and converted their blackboards into windows wide open for the world to see. We want it to have a ripple effect so it extends from school to school and knows no boundaries.

We are neither the first nor the only organization trying to understand the workings of teaching excellence, but we are one of the foundations most committed to this task in Spain. Following the work of N. Flanders in the 1960s on teacher-pupil interaction and other American researchers (such as Bob Pianta at University of Virginia, Pam Grossman at Stanford, and Charlotte Danielson of the Danielson Group), over two years we have designed ten observation protocols.

The result of these two years of intense, thorough, and exciting work is a methodology of enormous potential (only currently available in Spanish) including: simulation and classroom observation videos, teaching guides for each of the ten protocols, and impact studies that will guide the implementation of this methodology in a pool of schools in Galicia (NW Spain) over the next school year.

And this is really important because the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) recently published by the OECD highlighted the alarming lack of assessment of Spanish teachers. According to TALIS, 36% of teachers have never been formally assessed by any methodology – a figure five times the OECD average of 7%. The report also points out how essential feedback about a teacher’s classroom activity is to progress, so an absence of this performance evaluation is clearly dangerous for quality of teaching.

Knowledge is the currency of the information and internet era. Our founder, the businessmen and benefactor Pedro Barrie defended this idea when he set up his foundation, one of the first corporate philanthropy initiatives focused on education in Spain. In the almost fifty years since then our sole leitmotif has been to invest in people’s skills so they become “social multipliers” and play a key role in the development of society.

The Barrie Foundation has taken on the role of social investor, driver and administrator in the conviction that the value of small and medium-sized foundations is not just their funding but their ability to design projects. We advocate “smart philanthropy” – bringing together the ideas and global vision of international benchmark figures (like Jesús and Joseph), designing new courses of action (observation protocols), funding them, and incorporating innovative teachers and administrators, with the necessary consensus of educational leaders in government.

Because of their potential impact on society, especially in the field of education, leadership skills and intelligence are required when trying to combine relationships and interests in some projects. This may well be the added value of our foundation and this is what we are doing with PROFEX21.

Javier Lopez joined the Barrie Foundation as Chief Executive Officer in January 2009. Under his leadership, the Foundation has reinvigorated its education program, developing and assessing initiatives designed to improve the quality of teaching. Javier has more than 15 years of experience in promoting and supporting the transfer of knowledge, innovation, and technology from universities and research centers to industry and society. Before joining the Barrie Foundation, Javier was executive director of Fundación Empresa-Universidad Gallega (FEUGA), the region’s largest technology transfer nonprofit organization. Previously, he served as venture executive at UNINVEST holding a variety of upstream responsibilities in field development, strategic planning, non-operated joint venture management, business development, and technology management. Since 2009, Javier has been an active member of the Spanish Association of Foundations and an important connector in fostering collaboration between the Foundation and governments, foundations, and education organizations worldwide. Follow Barrie Foundation on Twitter @FundacionBarrie.