Catarina Song Chen

Catarina Song Chen is a visionary educator, school leader, executive board member, and one of the longest serving directors in South America. As the Head of School at the American School of Belo Horizonte (EABH) in Brazil, she has transformed and reignited her school community that nearly lost its footing during the economic crisis in 2008. Today, EABH celebrates 65 years of excellence and innovation. We met with the multicultural pioneer, who has roots in Korean, Paraguayan, American and Brazilian culture, to discuss the importance of school culture, her co-teaching programme, and how she positioned EABH for another half a century of growth.

Catarina, with 13 years at the helm of EABH you are one of the longest serving school directors in South America. What was the situation like when you started as Head of School at EABH?

I started when the global economic crisis of 2008 reached Brazil. It forced the multinational companies that had settled in Belo Horizonte to repatriate their international executives back to their respective countries. As the result, enrollment at EABH dwindled to less than 100.

Belo Horizonte is the capitol of Minas Gerais, and the second most populous state in Brazil. But suddenly there was no waiting list and a lack of international clientele. The EABH board hired me in 2009. Little had I known that the school was on the brink of losing its American school accreditation status, with 4 previous heads of school during the last 5-year period, and financially in the red.

I was excited by the prospects of leading a school, but also petrified of the predicament the school was in. I decided to see this crisis as an opportunity to turn things around. Immediately, we conducted a market analysis to understand our viability and anticipate our new communication strategy. We learned that there were numerous misconceived perceptions about the school, its purpose, and effectiveness. We were perceived as an overpriced language school, or as a school exclusively for expats, and many were afraid that if their children attended our school, they would lose their Portuguese language skills, move abroad, and never return to Brazil. We used the information gathered to craft our new strategy, and to address all the myths and misinformation that had been warding off potential families from enrolling at EABH. Slowly but steadily, we had new enrollments streaming in. New families began to experience first-hand the benefits of an international education.

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From the humble beginnings as a missionary school founded by parents in 1956 to becoming a leading IB World School in Brazil with a stable student body close to 500, what would you say were the most important steps you took to change things around?

The catalyst for positive change was our initial focus on the school’s culture. Then, together, we created a new curriculum that was taught and assessed with new approaches and strategies. With the rationale that form follows function, we then worked on the physical aspect of our growth and have since been executing our new master plan to construct classical and contemporary learning structures as well as to accommodate our growing student enrollment.

I cannot stress enough that the key to any progress is to first invest in the school culture. When I joined EABH, I noticed that there was a non-intentional, but preexisting divide between local and international teachers. We did not feel like one school. The classroom distribution and arrangements, the vernacular adopted and used by teachers, and the collaboration schedules or the lack thereof represented silo structures rather than a harmonious, unified learning environment. I knew that if we did not disrupt the status quo and begin to engage in difficult and meaningful conversations in a safe, positive, and inclusive environment, we would not have the foundational structure to grow on and develop upon successfully.

With all the changes in place, EABH became the second school in Brazil to become an IB World school with the PYP and MYP authorizations. This helped us to accommodate our transient population and support our dynamic character, while simultaneously building a framework that provides consistency for our local students and teachers. It took some time to develop our culture, but it soon provided us with the common working language that we needed to communicate effectively. Today, we are the first school in Latin America to offer a comprehensive co-teaching program in the PYP. We have two full-time certified teachers working in the classroom. With a ratio of one teacher to eleven students, we have a Portuguese-speaking teacher and an English-speaking teacher working together in a multilingual learning environment, using translanguaging to teach our target language in a humane and natural process.

65 years of EABH is a great reason to celebrate your achievements. How do you prepare the school for the future and perhaps for even more challenging and unpredictable times?

We have come a long way and what I value the most, and credit as responsible for our development, are the people that make up our school community, because it is the people that sustain the culture. I am very proud of our school community – it’s a source of pride for all who know and are a part of EABH. Jim Collin’s book “Good to Great” has served as a bible for me. His rhetoric of putting the right people on the bus and then putting them in the right seats has helped me stay focused on the school’s mission. Today we have a ratio of 70% locals and 30% international students. This is a very healthy quotient that could potentially protect us from other future transnational crisis or global economic change.

Our school’s current theme is: Bold Moves. This theme is inspired by the great work of Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs and Dr. Marie Alcock, that focuses on guiding great schools to continue on their evolution from classical to contemporary learning structures. As EABH celebrates 65 years, it is also positioned to celebrate another half a century of growth. Just as our community of the past and present has helped us to reach this milestone, it’s the people, our spirit and culture, that will empower us to continuously evolve as learners, constantly reexamining our roles, mindset, and responsibilities. Our Bold Moves include striving to become a Hub of Excellence, where our teachers and staff redefine their roles as modern educators and increase their human capital to share and collaborate with other educators outside the boundaries of our school. The rest is a natural consequence of good people in their right seats.

Thank you, Catarina for sharing your inspiring journey. To learn more about her work at EABH visit:   www.eabh.com.br